Less advertising is a Very Good Thing

Just a "service message" here: regular readers will notice that the Infolinks advertising has been disabled ... it hasn't malfunctioned, it's been deleted! Anyone who is exploring the possibilities of earning a buck or two from their blogging will have been looking at systems like Infolinks, and I should say a few words about them right here before just turning them off!

Infolinks is extremely simple to set up, and you do indeed get clicks that earn a couple of pennies each. However, some readers find the ads intrusive (I do, myself). Even that wouldn't be so bad -- you could live with it -- if all clicks generated were earners. They're not. In the month of February (I just peeked at the stats) 80% of all clicks on these intrusive little ads earned zero, and that's untenable.

It's just ridiculous to have annoying little ads shoving themselves into readers' faces, and then returning zero when they're actually clicked (which ain't often enough to be significant, either). Nobody ever mentioned a word about zero-return ads: if they had, you guys wouldn't have had to look at them for the last couple of months. Put it another way: all this is doing is diminishing the "experience" of this blog while raking in money for Infolinks ... there's no trickle down.

And you don't have to look at them anymore: gone. Deleted. Out of there. Do I recommend Infolinks to folks who're looking to "monetize" their pages? No. Google Adsense is a very tough system to make work (put it like this: too few people click too few of the ads too little of the time to make it really worth the bother of having the damned ads there), but it's a lot less intrusive than the "in-text" advertising. So --

Gone. Back to the drawing board!

More later -- end of service message...

Ciao for now,
MK