Blog: Advertising Policy

Yes, some of you may have noticed the new “sponsored link” at the top of most of the blog pages. I didn’t really want to have to increase the advertising on the site – but considering only a few people have taken up the sidebar advertising offer (500 impressions for just $1, or a minimum of 20 clicks for $0.25 per click), I’ve had to start running the premium adverts (1000 impressions for $3 or a minimum of 50 clicks at $0.50per click: but adverts are cached for 30minutes per time!).

Why the need for adverts at all? Well, whilst I’ve got plenty of disc space, it’s bandwidth that’s causing a few costs – I’m transferring around 2Gb of data per month and that’s quite a lot for a “personal site”. Combined with the other sites I host, it means that I consume too much bandwidth for most hosts and therefore I’ve got to have a dedicated server for myself and they cost lots of money 🙁

Add that to the fact that I’m having to fork out money for the prizes in the Guess That Movie competitions and I’m not getting a lot of returns via the Amazon links (just 4 purchases so far of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix amazoncom:043935806X and that’s it!), means that the blogs costing me quite a bit of cash at the moment… I don’t mind too much, but I don’t want to constantly support it out of my own pocket (along with my time).

Hopefully, the adverts will be unobtrusive and hopefully bring in a few necessary dollar pounds every month, but comments on the adverts would be appreciated (or just buy some ads yourself: they’re really cheap and you’ll get your ad seen by around 660 daily visitors: plus they has been only two purchases for the premium adverts so far, meaning that there aren’t too many sites in rotation at the moment!)

All adverts are handled by TextAds (who accept payment via PayPal) and are included in the source code of the page (so no Javascript includes are required) – go on: help support the blog by buying an advert or making a donation via Pay Pal.

Of course, if somebody makes a generous donation of around £1,000 (which will cover the web hosting for the blog for a year by my reckoning), the adverts will disappear overnight…