Friends and family frequently ask, “Laryssa, when are you going to put ads on Too Shy to Stop? You need to start making money from your website!”
They don’t usually like to hear my answer: I refuse to put advertisements on the actual Too Shy to Stop website. Why?
1. I love the layout as it is, and I don’t want to mess with its integrity
2. At this stage in our development, advertisements would not pay enough to make up for the fact that I don’t like how they look on the website.
To attract good advertisers, you need to have a ginormous readership. Think Gawker, a snarky online media news and gossip magazine draws approximately three million readers/month. They can get prime advertisers like Svedka Vodka (currently on the site) who will create ads that Gawker can integrate into the layout.
(Pictured at left: Print ads are passé, by Andreas Pizsa)
Anyway, I started playing around with Google AdSense because I was curious about it/sick of letting everyone else have fun with advertising. AdSense is a no-brainer way to add advertising to your website because you don’t actually have to do business with the advertisers. Google takes care of the business aspect for you; you just tell Google what size/type of ads you want on your site and paste some code into your web pages.
Using AdSense, I monetized the RSS feeds for Too Shy to Stop and this website. I also inserted a vertical ad in the right sidebar of this site (see the right-hand side). I have really low expectations for the money I will make running these ads. AdSense does not pay very much, and you only earn money when a visitor to your site clicks on the actual ad.
Google decides which ads are relevant enough to run on your websites/feeds based on keywords found in your content. If you click a different post title on this site, you will find that the ad sort of matches the content. Try it!
I just wanted to try AdSense for the experience. Don’t worry, though; I’m not going to put ads on Too Shy to Stop anytime soon…or ever.
Definitely interested to see how this develops.
Another form of advertising in which you don’t have to interact with the advertiser: affiliations (aka referrals). Big organizations like Apple iTunes, Delta Airlines and AT&T Wireless advertise online in this way.
The hitch: The publisher won’t make money unless someone buys something through the ad (ie, until you’ve referred a paying customer to the advertiser). And with online purchases dropping, … .
I just wanna be rich. Is that too much to ask?