Advertising Because Times Are Tough, But What Should Be Advertised?

Times are tough with the whole financial crisis, job losses, and an auto industry on the edge of bankruptcy, (although they just got loan money today). Accordingly, I’ve started some major advertising on Things I’ve Noticed to help defray TypePad’s monthly fees for the blogging service. I use both Google text ads and Adify’s high-falutin’ animated ads. (Feel free to click all you want, especially if you’re interested in what’s in the ad.) I figured out that if traffic to Things I’ve Noticed goes from 40 visitors a day to 100,000 visitors a day, I could live off of my blog, but that will never happen unless the top 50 blogs in the world start linking to me. I don’t see that in my future, so I have to continue working in a real job.

I have been noticing what’s getting advertised in these spaces on my site. With Google, I have little control but with Adify, I can approve or reject campaigns. I consider whether I want to advertise products or services that aren’t in keeping with my philosophies, or are too cheesy, even for this blog. For instance, I didn’t want to advertise meat products, so I rejected the McDonald’s campaign.  The specific advertising on my Google ads depends on what I write about, but I can't single out companies, only topic areas.  Although, I’m a very very small time advertising venue without complete control, I will do what I can.

But I wonder about ads accepted by major newspapers, magazines, and websites. Sometimes they advertise things like police radar camera license plate blocking sprays or products that enlarge certain body parts even when they know that these products are illegal and/or don’t work. I’m surprised that they don’t want to protect their readers from fraud or their own image by rejecting such ads. They just look the other way as long as the advertising revenue is coming in. It would be nice if they would verify the credibility of the advertisers before placing such ads in their publications or on their websites. I guess, in the end, it’s all about the money. That’s why I’m forcing readers of T.I.N. to endure ads that take up significant screen space, and I apologize... but I gotta eat.

+ Atul

Comments

[Aleksandar M. Velkoski]

http://www.adify.com/things-i-ve-noticed-blog-heightens-ad-review-power-with-adify/