In the 1990s, it was very difficult to get any kind of compensation for developing content and putting it on the Internet. That’s presumably how we ended up with an Internet that is 99 percent spam, porn, and catalog shopping. I never liked banner ads and did not place them on any site that I controlled because the ads were so poorly targeted. It seemed like a waste of everyone’s time and energy when the chance of the reader being interested was so low and therefore the chance of a clickthrough was minimal. Sure enough, ad rates that had been reasonably high in the 1990s fell to the point that even very popular sites couldn’t get serious money from banner advertising by 2002.

A friend convinced me that perhaps it was time to give Google Ads a try. The ads are targeted by looking at the words on the page where they appear. The ads are text, so they’re not graphically obnoxious. I started my experiment by adding Google ads into the bulletin board pages at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/ . This is a server that suffered a database meltdown six months ago. Nobody is going there to post anymore. I had planned to throw the machine out. Google’s terms prohibit me from writing about the clickthrough rate, but not the bottom line. After about 10 days, it seems that the ads are bringing in a steady $60 per day or nearly $20,000 per year. Encouraged, I put some ads into a few of the pages at http://philip.greenspun.com, including the materialism, flying, and aquarium subdirectories. These bring in another $20-30 per day and the click through rates are high enough that I don’t feel too embarrassed for wasting screen space and reader attention.

Could it be that we are going to enter a golden age of content, fueled by the Google Ads team?