Ads on the ABW

Part of my commitment to stop ignoring my poor blog and get on livening things up around here is a reassessment of some design aspects of the blog, including ads. Currently there are three places I’d marked for ads: the top left, lower down on the right, and the bottom of the RSS feed. The later two are Project Wonderful ads, the first one is from BlogHer.

For various reasons, I’ve decided to drop Project Wonderful. I think it’s a great idea, but for this blog we weren’t really making enough money from it to justify the space it took up. The BlogHer spot brings in more money. But since the code there is a little nanky, I don’t want to put two on every page. I’m taking ads off the feeds completely since they didn’t do much for anyone, anyway.

Instead of a Project Wonderful ad, I’m going to sell space on the right sidebar directly. Rates will be low, ad design will be subject to my approval, and at least some of the time I will offer the space for no charge to causes, non-profits, etc. My goal is to place ads that I think will interest readers, not annoy anyone, and won’t make you run for the hills instead of visiting the site.

Hopefully this arrangement will work out for everyone. But if you have any issues or questions or comments on the state of ads here, please let me know in comments.

Here’s the page that describes the advertising scheme in-depth.