Playing with google ads

So, as steev discovered, i’m playing with putting google ads on anarchogeek. Why?! I’m an anarchist and think advertising and it’s associated capitalism is evil. The only country i know of which truly does not have ads is Libya, and my vision of liberation is far from Qadhafi’s.

What made me want to experiment in this was i was hanging out in the #rubyonrails irc channel and somebody said they were making $1000 a month by running google ads. They only ran them on secondary pages and didn’t put them in the rss. He said he got almost all of his click throughs from people who came from google and were looking for something else.

Then i got another random comment on a back post from my archives. If i could create a way to make some money off of ads which didn’t affect the folks i see as my readers, then it was worth a shot. Back before i started working at Odeo when i was traveling around latin america doing indymedia projects i managed to live on a few hundred dollars a month. What if i, and other activists, could figure out away to make enough to support themselves using a trick of the web, blogging, and google ads. That would be a way to free up some incredible activists and let them do what they do best, organize and fuck shit up.

So far, it’s only been three days, nobody but steev has noticed it, and i’ve made $2. The ads seem to be mostly about political sites which sell things, travel when i write about a specific place like uruguay, and books. Almost all of the money i’ve made has been from the post about Vail’s A Theory of Power book. If I were in to writing book reviews I’d probably make enough to make it worth it. I’ll see how long i keep the ads up there.

Update: That doesn’t mean YOU should go and click on the ads. Google tracks the click through as precentage of page views. The first two days i was getting a 1 or so precentage click through. But today it’s 20, which although it means i’ve made $10 so far, also looks a lot like i’m gaming the system. So if you’re a regular reader to anarchogeek, hold off on the clicking. Unless of course you’re really in to that chomsky book or really need the anti-bush thong underwear.