As discussed recently, I posed the question to the community whether it would be beneficial to integrate advertising into Some Random Dude. Soon afterward, I read the article, How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs and I became instantly intruiged by the idea of advertising by types of users based on refferals. I feel very staunchly about not penalizing this community (or any for that matter) for the sake of ad revenue. However, for visitors of tag pages which are primarily one-time visitors coming from Google searches, AdSense advertising is actually a good fit. Through studying my logs, I know that Google referred users that visit tag pages tend to leave after on visit – meaning they most likely did not find what they were looking for (unfortunately). AdSense, with its contextual advertising could actually benefit a large segment of this segment sense one or more of the ads may end up being more relevant towards what they were seeking. In addition, these pages are basically never viewed by the frequent readers/visitors, so their experience has been left pristine. This, from my view, seems like the best of both worlds.
I have plans for different areas of Some Random Dude to include non-Some-Random-Dude-content, but I refrain from calling it advertising at this moment. While I would love to go into that, it is a completely different discussion for a later date (hopefully soon). This AdSense integration will most likely generate very little revenue, but it is an interesting experiment that is worth trying. At the very least, if I am going to write about online advertising, I better be participating in it as well…
If you are interested in seeing what the AdSense advertising looks like, just have a look at this tag page. As you will see, the main content is unblemished while still offering the opportunity to generate some revenue. Please let me know you thoughts on this. I personally think it works very well with the goals of this site, but I really want to hear how you feel about it.
