I can't believe I've been writing this blog for 7 years! I had no intention when I started writing of showing ads. Most ads are crap & I hate crap ads. But I figured I would give it a try and see what kind of revenue I brought in. I wrote about my first results in this piece $100.39 in only 1,307 Days. That was on March 28, 2008. I've been writing less on the blog since Twitter came out, like a lot of people, and I've been slowly climbing back to the magic $100 USD payment threshold. I'm currently inching up $89 USD.
I've been thinking about it for a while, but Dave Winers' post Indirect business models FTW really got me moving on doing it with this quote:
I say don't put ads on your blog, they just pull attention away from the ideas you're writing about.
As soon as I read that, I knew I had to pull the ads soon. It just rings true for my kind of blog. But I held back, I wanted to replace Google Adsense ads with banners for my company Tangerine Element and my apps iTimeZone for iOS & SleepMute for Mac OS X. I figured if anyone wants to say "thanks" for something they read, just click through to an app & buy it.
Then while re-reading some of my older posts to write something new, I saw this:
Of course I knew this was going to happen, but I'm not advertising for Dell! WTF!?! I in no way endorse using Dell computers any more than I would endorse getting a hammer and banging on your skull to cure a headache.
I'm done, the ads are gone. When I get some time, I'll put up my own banners, but better to stop the damage first.