The ADD of Ads

Occasionally, my RSS subscribers drop me an email asking about the ads that show up in my RSS feed now. I get about 2 a week (which isn’t bad out of 9000 subscribers to the feed). They usually ask whether I know there’s a huge picture ad at the top of my blog post. (Which by the way taught me something about Google ads: they seem to relate to cookies in your browser. My feed ads are almost always for colleges, for Google itself, or for PR Web.)

I’ve been experimenting with ads in the RSS feed, and also inserting ad units in older posts found here on my site. There are three reasons:

1.) I can’t write about my thought on ads and affiliate marketing if I don’t know first-hand about it.
2.) I’m fascinated with the game of ads: who clicks, how many, why?
3.) I’m using ad loot to fund attendance of conferences that don’t have business value to CrossTech. (With as many shows as I attend, this is adding up.)

Sometimes, I shift the ads to the top of the feed. When I do, I get 5X more clicks. When I shift them back down, the number goes down drastically. (By the way, the best day ever on ads netted me $2.56, so we’re not talking retirement money, kids).

In a follow-up post to this, I’ll explain to you my entire thought process and theories on monetizing for bloggers. I had several more paragraphs to this post, but it seems to be more than one tack, and I’d like to separate the two.

So, I have ads in my RSS feed and within posts on weeks-old posts as a means to test out advertising (and to make conference-attending loot). I’m sorry if it bothers some of you. If you raise a whole hoot and fuss, I’ll consider moving them down again. But in the mean time, keep enjoying all the schtuff BELOW the ads. It’s there for you.

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