I’m three posts shy of 1,000 on this blog. While I passed that number long ago with personal ramblings over at my Vox blog—the one with all my trivialities—The Persuader is a little more special.
   It’s the blog that is hosted at the domain that takes my name and is, therefore, more tied in with my personal brand.
   Three years ago, not long after I began posting here in January 2006, I asked readers if they would mind if I put in a few ads. The answer was that it was up to me and there would be no objection if I did.
   I figured that since there are nearly 1,000 pages on this blog, I might as well make use of some of the real estate here.
   This blog is run with Blogger, a service I threatened to quit numerous times, but the prospect of shifting hundreds of posts to Wordpress was too daunting to a layman. In the last month Blogger has, on its Dashboard, included a ‘Monetize’ link, reminding bloggers that they could sign up with Google Adsense.
   I took the bait. After all, I believe I have readers’ blessings to do this.
   However, I found, after being a web publisher for 15-plus years, that Adsense is, at best, confusing.
   Even LinkExchange was easier when it was set up.
   Blogger had some link that allowed an ad to be placed directly into the blog layout, which is fine, but I then noticed that those ads did not have their own IDs in the Adsense menu for my account. I had to re-set a whole new bunch of ads.
   On all the other ad networks I have worked with since, well, the dawn of web publishing, it has been a very simple matter of pasting in some code. It’s sort of the same with Adsense, except you have far more screens to go through. And other things are just poorly explained. In fact, Adsense goes against the Google ideals of simplicity of use.
   Others may disagree as I realize many people use Adsense effortlessly, but I think I may be too set in my ways.
   So the Adsense ads that were displaying on this blog over the past few days are now gone, replaced by another bunch from Burst Media.
   The Google agreement prevents me from discussing specifics but in short, I don’t see what all the fuss is about regarding Adsense.
   For some of the blogs with higher traffic, I don’t see why Adsense would make sense.
   Burst supplies some of the advertising for Lucire and Autocade, and they have been pretty good to deal with. (Gorilla Nation Media is another company I can recommend via Lucire.)
   The ads are not very intrusive, and I have not put them into the feeds. They only appear on the blog’s web pages, and what little they’ll bring in will offset the hosting fees when the Kiwi dollar slips against the US. Posted by Jack Yan, 10:23  permalink

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