Monetizing Your Content

The Internet has become probably the most efficient mechanism ever devised for selling us stuff we don’t need.

There are all these sophisticated advertising engines available that can be integrated into your website and serve up relevant advertisements based on the content of your website, the geographical location of the user viewing your site, and other contextual information.

By using one of these advertising engines and, as they say, “monetizing your content”, the content owner (like Your Faithful Servant) can actually get paid based on ad traffic that your site generates. The key metric here is something called Click Through Rate (CTR). This is a ratio between the number of times an ad is displayed on your website and the number of times a visitor to your site clicks on the ad. CTR and your overall site traffic (page views) determine whether you can make any money.

One of the more popular of these advertising software engines is Google AdSense. If the advertiser gets lots of traffic from AdSense via your site, they pay Google, and then Google gives you a little bit of that. The blogging platform for my blog is Blogger which is also owned by Google. So, naturally, Blogger makes it very easy to add AdSense ads to your Blogger blog. Bloody easy in fact. Google makes an obscene amount of money from AdSense.

Until now I have held off on AdSense ads in my blog. Why? Those that know me well understand that I have too much personal integrity to sell out to The Man like that. (Stop laughing.) Actually, given the traffic (or lack thereof) that my blog generates, I am seriously fearful that Google might end up sending me a bill instead of a check. Or maybe AdSense would not even bother displaying any ads on my site – the “Why bother?” part of the algorithm would kick in.

So while I stand no chance at actually making any money, it is fun to imagine what types of online advertisements might be served up on my blog by Google AdSense. I could imagine the following types of advertisements starting to appear alongside my awesome content:

• Wiffle ball advertisements.
• Advertisements offering online courses for Remedial Catechism for Lapsed Catholics.
• ITIL-Based Service Management Enterprise Software advertisements.
• Advertisements for premium tailgate locations at sporting events.

You get the idea boys and girls – my blog is weird. But curiosity has gotten the best of me. I think I am going to go ahead and enable AdSense just for the potential comedy factor alone.

Stay tuned.