This morning I did something fairly significant, I killed off the Google Ads that were on the home page of this site. Over the next week or so, I’ll be killing them off on the rest of the site too.
According to the logs, in the last two months that I had well over 1700 visitors, in that time, there were nine click throughs, giving me a grand total of $1.01 in revenue.
That’s just a waste of time, and a waste of perfectly good space which I could be using to promote good things like…oh I don’t know, pretty much anything else.
Google has these ridiculous rules about their ads which seem almost Fight Club like. “The first rule of Google Adwords is don’t talk about Google Adwords. The second rule of Google Adwords is, don’t tell people that you have Google Adwords. The third rule about Google Adwords is, don’t tell folks that you aren’t making any money from Google Adwords because they’re not clicking on the links.”
Now by comparison, I can say anything I want to about Amazon.ca’s afilliates program. I can tell you that The DC Comics Encyclopedia, is an incredible book, available for only $35.00 at Amazon.ca, which is a savings of $15.00 from the store, and you should buy it right now (because it has the listings of literally hundreds of characters from Ambush Bug to Maxie Zeus!). When you buy it, I get 2.5% of the revenue. In the six months since I started posting my favourite books/DVD’s, etc, I’ve made around fifty bucks.
I’ll probably build some ads for my own products and get them on my site at some point, because some advertising would be a good thing (even if it was just for HeadsDown/HockeyUpdater stuff) but the great Google Adwords experiment is dead.