Brendan Tompkins [MVP]

Blog First. Ask Questions Later.

CodeBetter.Com Google Adsense...

Like Roy, we’ve decided to experiment with Google Adsense ads on our homepage. There are a lot of things we could do around here with a little cash, such as upgrade our hosting account, so we thought, why not?

Actually, we do everything around here by a voting process on our member forums. It’s pretty cool - if we have a decision to make, we just put up a poll, and go with a 2/3 majority vote. We put up the question “should we do a trial of adsense ads” and guess what? 86.7% of us thought it would be a good idea.

So we’ve got ads on our home page, and our aggregate blog page. Any revenue from these ads will go into a fund to support improvements here at CodeBetter.Com. We figure that most people view our syndicated RSS anyhow, with no ads, so this won’t even been seen by our loyal readers, right?

We’re not putting these ads on individual’s blogs, but you may see ads on our member’s blogs as well. These ads you see on an individual’s blogs are not funding improvements at CodeBetter.Com – any revenue made from these ads belongs to the blogger.

As always, let us know what you think, and how we’re doing in general around here!

-Brendan

Published Jul 20 2005, 09:21 AM by Brendan Tompkins

Comments

DawlinLi said:

Hopefully, with Google AdSense, codebetter.com can sponsor more blogs.

# July 20, 2005 8:14 AM

Eric Marthinsen said:

I doubt your trial will be of much succcess. The ads you are runnng are pay-per-click ads and the ads are so buried at the bottom of the page that they blend in with the page footer. You've definitely succeeded in making them unobtrusive, I just wonder what their effficacy will be. Also, the ads are not particularly well targeted. I run into the same problem on my site (www.codedaily.com). Occasionally, AdSense determines that the most targeted ads would be for apartments in Kentucky. Bizzare. With your number of page views, would you think about having a direct relationship with your advertisers and giving their ads a bit more visibility? If the ads are relevant and pitch great products, I doubt many of us would mind their presence.

# July 20, 2005 11:24 AM

Josh said:

I just hope you don't start including them in your RSS feed. Try subscribing to Marc Orchant's TabletPC blog - the feed is riddled with advertisments. As much as I was interested in keeping up with TabletPC news, I had to unsubscribe, it was so annoying. I hope it is not a sign of things to come.

# July 22, 2005 4:23 PM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Josh,

I don't forsee us ever adding ads to our rss feed.

Thanks for the feedback!

# July 25, 2005 6:35 AM

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About Brendan Tompkins

Brendan has been programming with .NET since the first public beta and is owner and operator of Port Technology Services, a consultancy company providing .NET application development services to the Maritime industry. In July, 2007, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET. He's also a proud co-founder of failed .COM startup Intrinsigo, and has had a hand in the failure of numerous other businesses. He currently runs CodeBetter.Com and Devlicio.us, and lives in Norfolk, Virgina with his wife Tiara and son Ian.