Are Google Ads the Root of All Evil?
Advertising = Tacky? Photo by the Killer Biscuit.
Glaukôpis has been wrestling with the problem of whether she should put advertising on her site. Inkycircus has declared Google Ads the new black. I removed them from most of my site because I was not happy with them.
Glaukôpis asks if putting ads on her site is selling out. Yes says one of her commenters. I think this is probably a non-problem, unless you’re snobbish – and some people are. Originally Classics or most academic research was what someone did if they had a private income. It’s fairly recently that being paid to research has been a possibility to the masses and with top-up fees and student loans that may be drawing to a close soon in the UK. There’s a distaste for commerciality because it’s not what the previous generation did. Glaukôpis asks if it’s selling out and if you change what you write to get better adverts then yes it is.
My own experience is that Google Ads wasn’t usually a suitable solution. Sometimes I write about artefacts and the adverts that came up were for unprovenanced antiquities. Not all of this would have been purchased by dealers from criminals. For example a study of Apulian vases has shown that at least 5% were reasonably likely not to be illicit, but there is a problem in fuelling the sales of illicit material. So I blocked these ads. What then happened is that I got more ads from other dealers with unprovenanced artefacts who weren’t willing to pay as much to advertise as the people I blocked. I blocked these and got another set of dubious ads. When you block enough of these you get to cheaper and less relevant adverts. In the end I was getting sub 1% clickthrough rates on cheap ads.
Faced with rising bandwidth bills I’ve moved to WordPress.com because private hosting was simply too expensive and I thought the adverts Google placed on my site were unsuitable. On the other hand I’m not against Google ads on other sites. On Blogographos they’re perfectly fine, and elsewhere they work, but if you’re going to blog about things that you dislike as well as like then the adverts are going to be dire. If I blog about MRSA then I really don’t want adverts by quacks pushing ineffective or dangerous treatments on site.
You can’t blame Google for the scam adverts, it’s a largely automated system, but it is up to the blog owner to decide if they’re happy being associated with the adverts that appear on a site.
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I had to remove my Google ads after I found out that some of the ads were about selling property on Northern Cyprus (which is illegal!). The irony was that at that time I had just posted a petition against illegal excavations on the northern part of the island. You can find the whole story at a post over samarkeolog: http://samarkeolog.blogspot.com/2006/04/mediterranean-archaeology-northern.html
I too removed my google ads for the same sort of reasons Ioannis did… I find them faintly obnoxious on other sites but certainly don’t fault a blogger for trying to make a little $$.
In a perfect world they would be useful, like affiliate links can be. A lot of the books I write about could be linked to the Amazon page where info like the current price, other reviews and if there’s a cheap second hand copy would be useful. If you’re doing that then it seems reasonable that the blogger should make some money from sales.
I think done well then Google Ads can be discreet and sometimes useful. It is also good that Google have made them accessible to small site, but like Ioannis shows not everything that comes out of Google is good.
I suppose the answer with adverts you don’t like is to click on them ignore the site it links to.
Yeah, Google ads are really nice in theory, but there’s only so much keywords can tell you. It can’t pick up on the tone of a post or the intent or the position of the author, only tell you what something is about.
Anyway, I have no idea if I actually write enough about things I know to be Bad to get the Bad google ads, so I’m giving them a spin. The moment I hit something like that, they’re off. I think the Amazon ads speak more to what I want to show anyway.
This is why I wanted WordPress as my host, I have no need, care, or desire for googleads, actually I detest any ad because they get in the way and distract me from why I really an there: to read the blog, not scour the internet for other things.
I’m pretty good a tuning out noise, which is all advertising, or at least 90% of it. How can you stay sane if you can’t block it out?
In spite of what adsense says, I think the program works for webmasters who cater their content to the ads. Seems like a lot of trouble, unless you have an entire team of drones creating content for you, and doing it for free or darn near. I can’t see google ads, or any, being an asset to any site unless the site’s purpose is purely comercial.
How can you stay sane if you can’t block it out?
You’re making an assumption there aren’t you?
I was once going to write a critique of Creationist advertising, with a Google ad block in the middle of the text to provide examples. Alas I never got round to it. It would have been interesting simply to see if it had any noticeable effect on clicks-thru.
I have to agree with SilverThorn, having a host where I’m not paying the bills is a relief. The only reason I have ads on any site is to pay the excessive part of hosting bills when I burst bandwidth limits. There are limits to using the .com version of WordPress — I’d find Flash inserts to be very useful — but the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
I certainly hope Γλαυκῶπις has the best of luck with them and that they help support her studies.