Monday, April 2, 2007

Monetize your blog vs. reader's friendly issue

Most bloggers know there are many ways to monetize our blogs. The most popular is Google AdSense, then we got chitika.com, text-link-ads.com, and much more that you can find the info easily on many threads about "make money online". There's several way to 'seed' ads to your blog, like AdSense that have its own box-although publisher/blogger often obscured it with/like as content-entitled with ads by Google, chitika that mere showing image, and also link form as text-link-ads. Although cooperating with ads can give extra revenue for blogger (indeed many bloggers got significant money from it), but we should think again whether readers feel enjoy and not annoyed when viewing our page that full with ads. Often ads put scattered-and cut away-content. As a reader, I feel that comfortableness decreased by that.
And there's another news correlated with my concern. I've read from John Chow website that he has entered into a partnership with Kontera Technologies, to run Kontera ContentLink ads on our website or blog. Kontera ContentLink are links (double underlined) that when hovered will make the ad appear. When a reader clicks the ad and visits the advertiser, we'll make money based on CPC.
He said, with this agreement and signing up, the requirement of 500,000 monthly page views will be ignored. So, not only high traffic site will enjoy these ads, but also low traffic site (certainly with quality content). Such a promising offers, because we can't only depend on Google or just one advertiser.
But sure this kind of ads is obtrusive. Sometimes readers also felt like deceived by this ads links. As a comment by Garrett Albright (also on JC site):
How apt that John "root of all evil" Chow would be propagating and encouraging this form of advertising. Come on, people, look at it from the prospective of the blog reader that you are; do you accept this form of advertising, with its fake-out "links" and its balloons that pop up over on top of content? Don't they always say that you should design your site with the perspective of the visitor in mind? What benefit is there in annoying your readers?
I personally hate Kontera, IntelliTXT and all of its ilk, and encourage all of you to think twice before implementing it on your own blogs. I would never implement advertising as intrusive as this on any site I manage, no matter how lucrative it may be.
But in my opinion, it's accepted if you want to monetize your site, although your readers feels slight change. All we can say is like exchange between useful info from website/blog that support by money from ads. Its simple as we saw the movie on television that cut away regularly by ads. The moral of the story is, maybe we can't completely erase ad from our life whatever hard we try :)
I think it's depended on how we harmonize each thing smoothly and seamlessly.