I’ve been thinking about the advertisements on this site quite a bit lately. The purpose of Amdall Gallery has morphed slightly over time, but it’s mostly been about sharing my love of data analysis and my (I hope) improvement over time as an amateur artist. I introduced ads partially because I enjoy experimenting with the website, but also to see if I could pay for a portion of the hosting costs through ad revenue. Well, after about a year of advertising…I’ve made about $30 total. So, I’ve been asking myself; is $2-3 per month worth having weird random images next to my sketches? It’s jarring sometimes to see.
Prior to today, I had advertisements in three places:
- at the bottom of all posts,
- end of the sidebar,
- at the very bottom of the site.
I’ve always found the ads at the bottom of posts the most annoying, since they appear right next to artwork in many cases. They’re aesthetically unappealing, and even though it goes against the purpose of ads, I didn’t want advertisements to be confused with my actual content. After writing a post, sometimes I’d wonder, “will someone associate this sketch with an ad for toilet paper or something?” All of that bothered me…so I got rid of them today. I’ve still got the other two locations though. I figured it might be a good idea to kick this question to the audience!
First off, here is a basic poll on how you experience them. Do you get irritating ads that clash with browsing the site? Or are you desensitized to web advertising completely? In all honesty, I use an ad-blocker most of the time…so I expect many people do the same, and don’t even realize I have ads here.
Take Our PollAnd overall, what rating would you give the ads on Amdall Gallery?
Advertisements on Amdall Gallery - Amdall Gallery
I hoped from the outset that the ad program would be fairly responsible and unobtrusive. It’s pretty standard with WordPress to use WordAds to generate advertisements, and the entities (Google Adsense, Amazon, etc) that bid are common to the web advertising world (more on how that works here). But despite all that, ads are still annoying and don’t pay that well for a relatively low traffic site like this one.
I still might completely trash them, but for now I’d just like to see if I can get any feedback on how they are now. What say you, WordPress community, social media followers, and random browsers?