Selling Out!

Just in case anyone missed it and thinks that I was trying to do something sneaky, I've started experimenting with Adsense. For those not familiar with what this means, I am putting a few ads up on the different blogs that I run. So far, I have added Google ads to this blog as well as my joke blog and my quotes blog. I have also attempted to add a referral link for Firefox to the home page of Arconati.us but am having some sort of technical problem. This one caught my attention the most because Google will give out $1 for each referral that leads to a download of Firefox. All total, here are the pages/sites with ads.

• Arconati.us
• My Personal Blog
• Arconati Comedy Blog
• Arconati Quotes Blog

Now, people who know me well should be crying foul at this point, as most of the time I speak out against advertisement. Perhaps I've changed and joined the Dark Side, you might think. But if you think about it logically, this is the United States of America, and we live in a capitalist society. Yet, when someone starts seeming greedy or sneaky by using or supporting the advertising industry all credibility as a person as opposed to a business seems to be thrown out the window. This is a strange standard.

It's a strange relationship we as citizens hold with other people and businesses. If they are individual or small 'Mom & Pop' organizations, no lack of support can be shown. Yet, at some point when the small business strolls into the Big Business arena, the small-town neighborly support dries up quickly. It's not like I'm a business at all in reality, but you could get my analogy. How do I portray the accurate 'me' when at the same time I'm hosting/displaying ads? It's like watching a movie overloaded with product placement or a television show with too many commercials.

It's a dilemma I've thought about for awhile as you can probably tell. I've come to the conclusion that I ought to at least try it and see how I feel, since it's my site(s) and I can do what I want. In addition, web advertising is a large part of the business I'm in (indirectly) so it might help my clients in the long run if I were more on-hands familiar with the industry.

My hope is that the advertisements will be small enough to be unobtrusive but perhaps successful enough to bring in a small amount of extra dough.

I've got to rationalize all this time in front of the computer to my wife somehow, right?

Note to friends and family: please don't click repetitively on these ads just to help donate to me. First off, the amount I'd get is too small for your time and second and most importantly, Google has some pretty sophisticated folks trying to trick them and they don't get away with it. In fact, they get their site(s) banned. I don't want to be mistaken for miscreants like those.