While I won’t pretend to speak for every sports blogger, I think it safe to assume that the vast majority started their sites without even considering the possiblity of making money from it. Because sports are a labor of love for many, the blogs begin as an extension of that love. But then something happens along the way, either a ticket broker contacts you, or maybe you see Adsense of Chitika ads somewhere and you start to consider making a couple bucks from your site.
For me, I resisted selling ads up until this year. Once I got past my bouts with altruism about providing content for free, my next debate was how much advertising to include? How invasive should it be?
If you check the the Adsense heat map it becomes evident that the best ad positions are those place where you may not want to place ads. They are key areas in your navigation, or in the midst of your content. Nobody wants to offend their regular readers by making ads too prevalent, but at the same time it is hard to have success if your ads aren’t visible at all.
For many I imagine it comes down to how comfortable the blogger is with the concept of “blog as business” versus “blog as love.” Over the last several months I’ve been transitioning more towards “blog as business.” Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t be doing any blogging if I didn’t enjoy it. But I’m becoming much more comfortable with the idea of actively purusing making money from my efforts. In fact that was one of the drivers for moving from Blogger to Wordpress. If it was only about generating content, I could have stayed on Blogger forever.
In terms of not offending regular readers, there are a couple ways to deal with it. The first, and most obvious is to ask? During a recent redesign I asked my readers if they had a problem with ads. I didn’t receive a single complaint and several readers encouraged ads. Now this doesn’t mean I didn’t offend anyone, just that nobody wanted to voice it.
Another option is to only show ads to new visitors, or visitors coming from search engines. Performancing has had a couple excellent posts about using some built in functions to see information about your visitor and decide whether or not to serve the ad.
Where do you fall on the spectrum? Do you have qualms about placing too many ads? Are there certain revenue models that you don’t pursue because you don’t like the appearance or the message it sends? Am I the only one that worries about this?
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