Yes. I have. Sorta. All 2.27 of my regular readers will have already noticed that my previously-unsullied blog now contains advertising. Damn my eyes.

“What gives?”, you might ask? Okay, so here come my lame-ass excuses: I’ve recently started doing a little freelance web-design, mainly in the form of social media marketing consultation. As part of this increasing work, I’m digging just that little bit deeper into a few of those aspects of the web that I had previously been only aware of, not fully knowledgeable in.

This here blog has always been the place where I test out new ideas, new WordPress versions, theme variations, widgets, etc., before putting them into my other “real websites”. My usual WP theme, Tarski, looks visually plain, but actually offers a heap of back-end behind-the-scenes code customization, which I am usually fucking around with one way or the other.

For advertising, I’m playing with Google AdSense. For those of you not “in the know”, it works something like this: you put some pre-generated ad-unit code into your markup, then Google “crawls” the website to try and figure out what it’s about, who is reading it, and then displays targeted ads that are supposed to match up.
Sometimes this is uncannily accurate; the ads seem perfectly matched to the content and readership. Sometimes this is uncannily bizarre; the ads seem to have no connection to the site, the readers, to reason, to sanity, to good taste, or to any known law of the known universe. In either case, the ads are constantly shifting and changing, so you never really know what you’re going to get.
Ultimately, Google pays the website owner based on how many ads are shown, and/or how many ads actually get clicked… eventually. At this point, for me at least, it’s been an interesting experiment in patience.

One particular post on this site gets 40-60 visitors every single day (I know, right?), so I figured, “What the fuck, why not?” It’s not a massive amount of traffic, but maybe the ads will buy me a coffee or two someday.

In the meantime, please lemme what you think about these ads. Too annoying? Too weird? Too sell-out? I’ll see how it goes; deletion is just one click away.