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Experimenting With Ads
By Cameron Sorden | September 13, 2008
You may have noticed over the last two weeks that ads have started appearing on my site. It was a small experiment on my part to see how lucrative it was. When I started Random Battle, I had made the decision to not have ads on it because I find them distracting and annoying. However, it seems like everyone uses Google ads these days. I slipped a few into my sidebars and one into my new feedburner feed to test it. I figured that if I could keep them fairly low-key and the money was decent, they could stay.
It turns out that they’re not very lucrative at all. In 14 days, I made something like $4. Furthermore, I’m directly helping gold sellers by keeping them up. Now, I don’t have a problem with gold sales, provided they’re not disruptive to game play — but I know a lot of you do. So with that in mind, I’m taking them down. Ultimately, I think having a welcoming and ad-free environment on my site is more important to me than a few extra cups of coffee each month.
I hope you all enjoy the return of the (now permanently) ad-free Random Battle.
Topics: Blogosphere, Personal, Random |
September 13th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Flat-rate, monthly sponsors are the way to go, or finding sponsors and charging them on a CPM basis. Google ads are horrible money makers unless you have millions of hits per month.
Hit me up if you ever want to chat about this.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I appreciate the offer, but eh. It was just an experiment. I’m really not looking to make money off Random Battle at this point. If I ever want to get serious about advertising, I definitely will drop you a line.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Gold sellers = hacked accounts = misery for players. That is why I don’t like them (oh and the spam in-game is really annoying; having some guy whisper me and calling me ‘friend’ turns my skin green).
September 16th, 2008 at 10:08 am
That’s not necessarily true. There are legit companies who operate without those kinds of underhanded tactics, and you only really expose yourself to account hacking if you pay for powerleveling.