A few days ago Lorelle asked “Who Clicks on Ads?”. It got some interesting answers.
On this blog the answer is fairly simple, not many people. That is to be expected and it is fair enough. After all WordPress users are savvy bunch who tend to see through advertising? right?
I run another site that is based around photography and I frequently see ads on my own site that intrigue me. If it weren’t my own site, and therefore forbidden, I would click that advert to take a look. I am possibly one of the most sceptical people around, but still, I do click on adverts.
This leads me to conclude that there is a pretty big gap between advertising topics. A blog on WordPress for example is unlikely to feature that many relevant ads. A site on photography is likely to feature a very large number. It is all about money. The amount of money to made by advertising to WordPress users is relatively small. Perhaps therefore no one is advertising their free plugins.
As a blogger I want to earn a little from advertising, of course I do, but what I would like more is to have advertising that is complimentary; i.e. that people who come to my site and read my content are likely to be interested in, preferably things that people haven’t come across before, because that makes my site more interesting.
Depending on when you visit now, for a few months at least, you will see some different adverts. I have decided to give Adpinion a try. I don’t expect it will actually earn me any money at all but I thought the idea was interesting enough to try out and get your opinion, as readers, on.
Adpinion works on the idea of giving visitors to a site a voice about the adverts that are shown. Each advert has a little thumbs up, and down, and this is supposed to let visitors say whether an advert should be removed or not.
There is one fairly obvious criticism of the whole idea: If you don’t like an advert, ignore it. That’s what we all do now and there seems little reason to change; however, there are cases where I wish I could tell advertisers that I hate them for what they are doing: those pop up flash things that appear over the content when you are two paragraphs into the article, or inline adverts that add lines under text and which you always mouseover by accident.
Once it has been running for a little while I will let you all know what the statistics are, including how many people actually provided any feedback at all. I have made a guess, but only time will tell.