Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: advertising

  • To Block or Not To Block

    To Block or Not To Block

    Ad blockers. Okay.

    I have ads in this site. I have donation buttons. I make more via the ads, naturally, and I use the money to offset the absolute frivolity it is to run a web server. I also use ad blockers.

    And I also understand the worry of ad blockers on iOS because I see the possible loss of income.

    But.

    My ads are not obtrusive. I hope. I test them a lot on browsers. I don’t display them on smaller ones. I am picky about the ads. I don’t have pop-up/lightbox ads or alerts that congenially prompt people to sign up for a mailing list or try a service. I hate those things. They get between me and the content I’m trying to read. They prevent me from visiting sites. And if you’ve tried to click away an ad like that on your iPhone, you know my pain. Let’s not even get into the accessibility problems.

    No, ethically I chose not to host the ads I hate.

    And I lose money because of that.

    A lot of money. Probably a hundred a month, easy. And I’m personally okay with that, because I can afford this website. I have the money to keep it up, and for what it costs me, it’s cheaper than other hobbies. It’s helped turn a hobby into a career.

    But the same cannot be said of all websites. Many need those ads to survive and flourish.

    So in the balance between content and money, with accessibility and speed on the line, what is the right answer? Who is more important? Where is the right path to earn money while showing ads and not pissing off readers?

    And I’m not the only person who has trouble with this balance. The developers of Peace, an iOS ad blocker, pulled his product after two days, saying it didn’t feel good. He doesn’t like being the person who gets to decide what ads are right and wrong. That said, Marco is still a proponent of blocking for the ethical reasons of knowing who’s tracking you.

    Disclosure time! I use an blocker on my computer. It’s µBlock, which Taylor Swift also uses:

    But the truth is I actually block few things. It’s not that I want a blocker but I want an unobstructor tool. Just like we despised pop-ups, I hate the following things:

    1. Ads that redirect my iPhone to the App Store to buy your stupid game
    2. Ads that cover my entire browser window, forcing me to click away
    3. Ads that autoplay, making me scroll the hell around and figure out what I have to turn off
    4. Ads that popup in the background, making me address them before I can read

    If you can’t see a trend, let me explain it for you. I hate all things that pull me away from your content.

    The New York Times has reported on this: Enabling of Ad Blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 Prompts Backlash

    “When ad blockers became the most downloaded apps in the App Store, it forced publishers and advertisers to rethink the role that advertising plays on the web,” said David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design.

    That illustrates the issue. It’s not that we hate ads. Most of us understand them as a necessary evil. We pay for Netflix to get fewer ads. We pay for cable to get higher quality shows… in theory. We get ads with free TV because it’s free and has to make money. We get ads on newspapers and in magazines because they are surprisingly low cost for what they are. Ditto comic books.

    We know and we understand why ads are there. We rebel because the ads make it impossible to get at the content. The thing we came for.

    I don’t have an answer. I know that, sometimes, I actually do click on ads that interest me. I also know that most of the time people don’t click on ads. I know that many sites need ads to keep going and to keep delivering content. But I know what we’re doing, making ads more and more in your face, is not the right way to win.

    Right now I have no iOS ad blocker. I haven’t found one I like yet. I’m sure that will change.

  • Mailbag: Chocolate Cake is a Need

    Mailbag: Chocolate Cake is a Need

    Adrian in Florida has a long one! I’m going to break it up.

    I watched your presentation about “don’t use WP MU” have decided I shouldn’t use it but wanted to ask your advice on some other things. First I want to start by pointing out re the presentation:

    • I noticed that for the Wordpress.com network sites I noticed the WP toolbar does show on the sites giving them away as network sites except for one, Gigaom (perhaps there is a way to remove it?)

    • For some of us chocolate cake is a need, not a want.

    No, the cake is a want. And I use that example for a reason. We can joke all we want about how we need the cake, but fact is this: We need food. We want treats. If we can be clear in our hearts about needs versus wants, webdev is much simpler. I don’t need coffee. I like it. I can live without it. I don’t want to and choose not to. I can blog without WordPress. I don’t want to. I choose not to. It’s very important to be clear on needs and wants and choices in life in general.

    As for turning off the .com toolbar on Gigaom, I noticed when I visit there’s a blip where it shows the space for the toolbar and then it’s gone. So that suggests it’s CSS fixing itself. But the answer is “They’re a VIP customer and probably paid out the nose for that.”

    1. I just want to learn one theme/framework to make websites with and not change. I had already paid for Elegant Themes to get Divi which is supposed to be customizable and seems to have good video tutorials, before I saw your recommendation for Studiopress. I don’t know how to tell if I should scrap Divi and pay up again for Studiopress. Would you?

    I like Studiopress a great deal. It’s secure, it’s stable, it’s updated responsibly and reasonable, and Andrea Rennick is one of my BFFs. Divi I dislike because of how they handle sessions. But whichever you use is up to you. If you want a free theme to start with, I’d pick up Theme Hybrid. Justin’s code is second to none.

    2. I want to be able to make each page in my Wordpress site show up under its own subdomain. I’ve tried a few plugs like “page links to” which doesn’t work. I saw that there are some plugins that do this for categories. Do you know a plugin that enable each page resolve to a subdomain otherwise do you recommend one of the category plugins over another?

    This stems from his URL design which is page.example.com and … I just wouldn’t. It’s a waste of time and effort and locks you into a categorization that will be insane to unroll later.

    Now as a category that’s less weird and you can try one of these plugins:

    • https://wordpress.org/plugins/subdomains/
    • https://wordpress.org/plugins/main-category-as-subdomain/
    • https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-subdomains-revisited/

    I still wouldn’t use Multisite unless you really enjoy logging into a separate site for each post and not having an easy way to cross reference.

    3. Is there a plugin out there that allows different people to receive ad revenue for their posts? We have two different writers for one website, each should get ad revenue related to each’s own posts on the same website.

    This is actually why I bothered to answer. This is a cool question and I had no idea at all when I first read it.

    Turns out, yes you totally can have separate ads per author. If you’re using Google AdSense (you didn’t say), then try Multi Author Adense, which looks like you could set the code per author. There’s also Revenue Share which may be a little simpler.

    Good luck!

  • On Site Advertising: Affiliates

    On Site Advertising: Affiliates

    This is related to a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

    So what about those affiliates?

    Affiliates are simply links to other sites that earn you money because, after clicking on your link, they buy something. And in my experience, they are never going to be the big money earners.

    I’ve used the following, in no particular order:

    All those links are affiliate links, by the way.

    Unless I’m making a post that has a direct link to them, like I’m discussing them specifically, they don’t get a lot of traffic. The problem is, like ads, where do you put affiliate links for the best traction?

    In a weird way, links like those are why spammers spam links. They trust people will click on the random links and buy a product. If you turn your affiliate links into banner ads, then you can be more successful, but now you just have more and more cluttering up your site.

    This is pretty much why I suck at them, though. I don’t enjoy marketing. I hate the push of sales. The way I buy things is I look around, I ask around, and I test. I know what features I want and, if I don’t, I actually do ask people for help understanding them.

    I’ve read multiple essays on how to effectively be an affiliate, and the advice boils down to what CopyBlogger says about being honest and authentic.

    But I do reviews rarely, which means affiliate links are just these links that sit around and look link ‘powered by’ links, which they really are. I will say that I don’t have an affiliate link for anything I don’t use.

  • On Site Advertising: WordAds

    On Site Advertising: WordAds

    This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

    My experience with WordAds has been a little spotty. In terms of revenue, it’s far superior to ProjectWonderful. That said ProjectWonderful (and Google Adsense) have some aspects that make WordAds less than attractive.

    I used WordAds for about 13 months, and while I loved the plugin they made, and I loved the support, the problems I have are with the system and the quality of ads. I want to stress that this is a ‘review’ of their beta product. I knew what I was getting into with a beta, but there were issues with the system that went beyond what I’d normally accept for a beta.

    A beta is expected to be functional and usable if buggy. WordAds was functional, but I had no control and no information, which made it unusable.

    I had no control over ad placement, which normally I would say is the ‘fault’ of the plugin, but in reality it’s clearly the decision of the service. It provides two ads: one below the first post on an archive page and one below the post content itself on a single post. The ads are exactly the same shape. Most of the time this is fine. On some of my sites, which use ‘non traditional’ layouts, it made them very, very janky.

    Additionally I have no control over what ads show. The default ads tended to lean towards ClickBait. I don’t like that, but it’s pretty minor since default ads always kinda suck no matter what system you use. Still, I couldn’t pick and close ads I found offensive. The winner for this service is Project Wonderful. For WordAds I had to right click, get the information of what had loaded, and send that in to get it blocked. Given that most users just say “Did you know you had a Rand Paul ad on your site?” this was impossible to manage for me.

    When I combine this with the lack of information … Here’s the ultimate reason I called it quits. There’s no dashboard. There is no way for a user to see analytics. I had no way see what ads are doing well and where which means I could never evaluate the impact of them on my layout. Like many professionals, I review SEO impact and ad displays. I couldn’t do that at all on WordAds to the point that they had to email me a report of my earnings.

    I was told the manual emailing of revenue was a temporary stop-gap while the new system was put in place. Six months later, not only was I still getting emails, but I actually didn’t get one for a month and had to politely ask someone on staff. They were, as always, totally awesome about it, but I felt the underlying current was they too were feeling the strain of a lack of automation. It felt like there was no managerial and resource investment in what should be a killer product.

    Having earnings be a black box is a crappy user experience. Having analytics be a ‘just trust us…’ world is useless if I want to improve my site quality and revenue. I’m all for set-it-and-forget-it (which is ironically why I love the plugin), but the user experience for the service itself was disheartening.

    Review

    • Ease of Registration: 4/5
    • Ease of use (on WordPress): 5/5
    • Ease of use (non WordPress): 0/5
    • Customizable: 0/5
    • Control: 1/5
    • Analytics: 0/5
    • Revenue: 3/5

    When they get out of beta, I may check them out again, but right now I don’t feel comfortable having my eggs in an invisible basket.

  • On Site Advertising: Google Adsense

    On Site Advertising: Google Adsense

    This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

    Google Adsense is the grand daddy of ad systems, and if you can use it, it’s got the highest rewards. In the last 3 years, they’ve streamlined and upgraded and made the system incredibly nice to work with.

    I stopped using Adsense for the 3 years prior to this experience because I was frustrated with the lack of control. That’s far less the case today. You can now allow and block ads far more granularly than before. You can blacklist specific domains or specific types of ads. While it’s a little derpy to get the URLs, I was able to blacklist some anti-gay sites right away.

    Even though I still wish they’d just blacklist those people from making money in the first place (not Rand Paul, the hate sites), Google’s doing a much better job than they used to, and I feel morally better about it.

    Of course, while there are a bajillion WordPress plugins for it, there’s no official Google Plugin and because of that, I don’t use any plugin. The same code I wrote up for Project Wonderful is easily applied to how I want to use Google Adsense.

    Also Adsense remains the highest earner of any revenue stream I’ve used. Their current system even includes a scorecard, updating regularly, that explains how your site is doing:

    My scores are 5/5 mostly

    That ‘Site Health’ score being a 4 is due to WordPress putting ‘render blocking javascript‘ in the header. I’ll live. Everything else is fine.

    The interesting thing about Adsense is that Google’s rolling out something new. Google Contributor. And if you have adsense then it’s already on:

    Google Contributor is active

    I’m not entirely sure how it works, and I kind of want to see it be such that people can pick a site to sponsor, but the idea is a game changer I’m excited for. This alone was why I went back to Adsense.

    Review:

    • Ease of Registration: 4/5
    • Ease of use (on WordPress): 3/5
    • Ease of use (non WordPress): 3/5
    • Customizable: 5/5
    • Control: 3/5
    • Analytics: 5/5
    • Revenue: 4/5

    Adsense is old, but it’s aged well and Google’s treating it with love. It makes money, they appreciate that, and it shows.

  • On Site Advertising: Project Wonderful

    On Site Advertising: Project Wonderful

    This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

    I found Project Wonderful by accident. It was linked to on some comic book and fan sites I visit. For the most part, Project Wonderful is Project Pretty Good. It’s goofy, it’s silly, and most of the ads you get are for webcomics or ebooks.

    Revenue from it is also chancy at best. I average pennies a day, but I have a lot of control and I like that which is part of why my revenue was so low. I set it up so I have to approve every single ad and ad change, which is exceptionally time consuming. This also causes lower revenue, but the primary reason I like it is that control.

    I can block users, I can report them for scams or bait-and-switch, and I have a very wonderful rapport with the staff there. They’ve told me before that they appreciate my reports. If I change my mind about an ad, it’s a little tricky but I can go and find it and reject it after the fact.

    There’s no plugin for this ad network. You have two bits of code to put on your site, the basic Project Wonderful JS that loads their commands and then the code for each ad-block. It’s pretty trivial to make a plugin for it, and in fact I made a shortcode that allows me to run [pwads id=name], where name is the name of the adbox. It’s a very basic switch check and sanitize and it works fine for me.

    This code is also accessible outside of WordPress because the shortcode is calling a separate file (like /secret/ads/projectwonderful.php ) which I can then use with sneaky includes. But that’s another post. What must be known here is that I have it working in and out of WordPress with the same code base.

    The biggest problem with Project Wonderful is that it feels like 1999. The site is old and dated. The interface is clunky and has a crappy UX if you’re on a tablet. Don’t bother with a phone.

    The welcome page is pretty nice:

    Project Wonderful's welcome page

    You have links to all your ads, you can click on them for more ads:

    Project Wonderful's Admin Interface

    It’s not bad, it’s just dated. Also they have downtime a little more than I’d like to see. It used to be bad but now it’s once in a while. The real problem with the downtime is it makes my site slow.

    Review

    • Ease of Registration: 4/5
    • Ease of use (on WordPress): 3/5
    • Ease of use (non WordPress): 3/5
    • Customizable: 5/5
    • Control: 5/5
    • Analytics: 3/5
    • Modernity: 2/5
    • Revenue: 1/5

    I’m still using Project Wonderful, but the revenue certainly is something hard to accept. I stick with it, mostly, because it’s ethically pleasing.