I had to borrow the car today so I took my roommate into work and picked him up. As usual, I hung my arm out the open window when I drove, and when I got to roomie’s place of business, I noticed I had these tiny little blisters over most of my arm. I knew it was burned from the trip last week, but it looked more tanned than not. I guess the exposure to the sun today was too much.
I look like I have white measles. But you don’t want to hear that. You might want to hear, though, that I’ve removed the Google Ads. Again. See what you miss when you read this through an aggregator?
I’m not sure if it was the fundamentalist religous ads that kept popping up, equating disasters such as hurricanes to loss of faith; or the ’sell your blood’ ad associated with the posts encouraging people to donate blood to the Red Cross. I do know that the pennies I get each day to run the ads aren’t worth seeing crap like that in my weblog. Once I went to full syndication feeds, the click through rates tanked, and I don’t want to take time to tweak the ads through channels to filter out the type of businesses that seem to be making Google rich.
If I embedded the ads directly in my posts, I might break a buck a day; but I’m already feeling a little disassociated from the weblog by providing the full feeds–I don’t want to add yet more ’stuff’ to the site. What can I say? I suck at marketing.
I think ads work when you have a focused site on a ’safe’ topic, like photography. They’re also profitable if you really work it, like those who supposedly make thousands of dollars a month. If I have a focused site, I may add them back, but not in Burningbird; not when I talk on so many different topics. Yeah, I know: I suck at marketing.
I’ll have to send a note into Google to cancel the account. They take up to 90 days to pay when you cancel–it takes so long for them to process an email since they won’t automate the cancellation process. I guess the company is a lot like the Hotel California: you can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave. However, Google doesn’t suck at marketing.
