For almost the entirety of the existence of this site, I have abstained from running any advertising.. with the exception of a brief time when I ran ads to support 9rules.
Lets be clear here, I have no problem with people running ads on thier sites and making money. I am very much in favor of people being rewarded for what they do, in whatever way they decide is important.
For me, that reward was always the conversations and activity that I saw on the site as the years went on. Although that is still the case, things have changed financially for the Czar of SIllyness.
The problem
My lovely wife decided when we discovered she was pregnant, to stay home for an undetermined amount of time. She had been working in Corporate Banking and was fed up as it were. I supported her decision, and so she left her job and we went down to one income. It has been hard at times, but we have managed it.
As costs rise, in conjunction with my son’s age rising, we find ourselves having more bills with the same amount of money. Not good.
Getting to the point
All this to say that I will be selling some advertising space in the footer of my site for the next year, to help offset the rising costs at home. I have been working on freelance projects as I can, which has helped but it has effectively ended any contributions to Habari and I just can’t stand it anymore. The income from the advertising will allow me to do less side work, and focus more on Habari, which is a good thing.
I just felt like I owed it to some of the people who have been reading this site for years, to explain why the advertising will be showing up. Another side effect is I hope to have much more time to dedicate to writing here, which I have been lax on lately.
This will certainly be interesting.
Stroll on over and visit khaled
June 21, 2007
What are you going for Chris?
Google Ads or are you actually going to go a bit further and sell some space to specific people?
Btw is there a donate button anywhere?
Stroll on over and visit Chris J. Davis
June 21, 2007
Hey Khaled.
I was approached with a very attractive offer to sell some space for ads in my footer. It is a guaranteed amount per month which was much more attractive than something like Google Ads.
I don’t have a donate button, but I could always place one somewhere. I used one for my first apachecon trip (Germany)… so I could pull it out again I suppose.
Stroll on over and visit Ben G.
June 22, 2007
Hey Chris, I’ve been there (am still there). That’s exactly why I’m running ads on my site. As my son gets older and ministry seems to not pay any more than it did 4 years ago I’ve got to find all the money I can.
I understand if you don’t want to put up a donate button but if you could send me your paypal address it would bless me if I could donate something.
Stroll on over and visit Jochen
June 25, 2007
Chris, when you’re giving something to the web community e.g. your involvement in the Habari project I think there is nothing wrong with earning some money with your site. On my travel blog for example the hosting costs (due to traffic) are very high and therefore I’ve started to place some adsense ads although I’ve always hated them. It realyy helped me to to keep on blogging. So go for it and if you can find more time for Habari go ahead. Habari is really a cool approach.
Stroll on over and visit Rob Kistner
June 27, 2007
*HELP! — My son, who is competent, tried to update my blog, which is a K2 theme, from WP 2.0.7 to 2.2.1 and it had error messages at the top — so he tried to go back to my 2.0.7 version. In trying to go back to 2.0.7 my sidebar disappeared, as did the “K2 Sidebar Modules” tab under “Presentation”. What do I do?
Stroll on over and visit Chris J. Davis
June 27, 2007
Rob,
Go to getk2.com and ask on the forums. I haven’t touched WordPress in a year or more, so I don’t have the first clue what might have went wrong.
It might be a conflict with the K2 widget implementation, and the one that is now in WP.
Stroll on over and visit david
July 4, 2007
I’m not a big fan of ads on personal sites, but I can understand why people put them in. I personally resisted google’s adsense for a long time, but now I’ve decided to put them on older posts (over 3 or six months old.) I also have amazon.com links on my site, but I write a lot on tv, so linking to tv shows on dvd’s makes sense.
On thing I will never do is put those gawd-awful context links on my site. I tend to avoid sites that have them.