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Friday, December 07, 2012

The Ad Experiment Early Results

I am deeply amused. The results of having ads run from November 19 to now show very little activity. In fact, only one ad was clicked and I suspect it was by accident since it was on a smartphone if the tracking info is accurate.

Finalized money earned for November was…

Drum roll, please…

Okay, I can’t afford a drummer, but here it comes…

$1.52.

Of which, $1.32 was from the one click. Lest you think people with anything but a high traffic sight make any money from running ads, I must point out that AdSense does not pay out until you hit the $100 mark. Which would be 8-10 years with the current hit rate on this blog. BTW, that one click is the only one after 5,000 ads shown, which makes it a fraction of a percent.

This explains why you see some web pages that seem to be all ads with the content wedged into a small area in the center. People do this to increase the rate of ad “impressions” and mistaken clicks.

Between that and the usage of ad blocking plugins for some browsers, it is questionable to me how effective web based ads are. Advertising has always been a traditionally low response medium for getting product and brand awareness out there, but on the web it seems worse.

I’ll keep the mad scientist experiment going for some months just to see if a more complete picture is formed.

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