things kevin hates

Not too long ago I complained about TV commercials. What form of advertising am I going to complain about today? Internet advertising. Except this time I’m not just the embittered consumer sick of ads ruining his television-viewing experience. This time I’m also the greedy capitalist looking for a few dollars.

When I first moved this blog from wordpress.com to its own domain, I thought, hey, there’s a chance I could make some money on this. Maybe not a lot of money, but hopefully enough to cover the $20 a year I pay for the domain name. (Fortunately, the hosting is free; thanks again to Rob Heath for the help.) And who knows, maybe it’ll be like the lottery, except with a lot more work involved.

But that’s not how it works. The Internet is made for niches. Find a niche, cover it in detail: obsessively catalog everything about your favorite TV show or sports team or video game. Then watch the search engines direct the traffic to you. I get a fair amount of search traffic (compared to what I get from direct traffic and links from facebook, twitter, and other blogs), but it’s an interesting, very scattered mix.

And that just covers getting people to your website; niche sites also have a huge advantage in targeting ads to their users. If I blogged exclusively about golf equipment, I’d probably have a bunch of ads about golf equipment, and people who searched the internet for information about golf equipment and ended up at my site might very well click an ad. But when you have a site about Glee and Saints football and punctuation marks no computer (and likely no human, either) is going to be able to make any sense out of it. It’s not a good recipe for advertising.

In going through the legalese of the Adsense agreement, I had first thought I couldn’t reveal how much money I make. It turns out that I “may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.” The payments? None, because you have to accrue $100 in revenues to get a check from Google. And even if I decide to cancel, I need to reach $10 in revenue for Google to send me money. Where am I at right now? 76 cents from roughly 7600 hits on my site. 76 cents. Surely my blog is worth more than that, isn’t it?

But let’s face it. People hate ads on the Internet. I don’t know anybody who regularly clicks on the damn things, and yet somehow Google has made $80 bazillion dollars on Internet advertising. I mean, think about it: do you ever click ads? Every now and then a worthwhile one will show up in my Gmail account or on Facebook. After all, they’re datamining everything about my damn life, they had better be able to target ads well enough to get me to click. But on a site I come across either directly or by search traffic? Roughly never. And yet somehow there’s a fortune to be made.

Finally, if I’m going to bitch about Internet advertising, I might as well add in a few pet peeves: I can’t stand pop-ups. Or ads that play sound automatically. (Which reminds me: I need to get a Chrome plug-in to kill ESPN.com’s autopsy feature. That annoys the crap out of me.) Or anything that resizes my windows. Or anything that delays me from getting to the website I want to visit. Or commercials during online TV shows.