Sunday, February 23, 2014

My First Week of AdSense

It's been a week now.  How has AdSense done for me so far?  (You can read Parts 1 and 2 by clicking on the links.)

I'll come out and say it: very disappointing.  Over the first week of having AdSense turned on, I've only received two clicks for a total of $1.28.

Though, an average of 60 cents a click really isn't that bad.

I've decided to step it up a bit.  I'm going to try adding an AdSense widget under my main post.  (Hopefully it won't show up on my RSS feeds ... I don't want these ads to be too annoying).  Right now it's showing up blank, but I think after a couple of days, it'll be approved, and I'll be in business.

Also, I must report an annoyance.  There was this one T-shirt ad that kept popping up.  It wasn't anything terrible, but it didn't seem to match my blog.  So, I attempted to block that specific ad.  However, I found that to be nearly impossible.  I tried to find the brand name of T-shirts to block, but I came to realize that the advertisers are listed, and not the brands being advertised.  And I have no way to know who the advertiser is.

What would be very helpful is this: Since the blogger isn't allowed to click on his own ads (so as to produce income for himself) ... it would be nice to program the interface so that if the blogger does click on the ad, it opens up a list of options: "Block This Ad" and other options bloggers may be interested in.  This would be a lot more useful than "do a Google search on the key words of the ad to figure out who the advertiser is."  (I hope I don't ever have to go searching for an offensive topic just to block that ad.  Who knows what the NSA might think about me?)

I had to ultimately decide to block ALL shirt ads.  The good are going out with the bad!

Oh well, this has been fun.  This is not going to be a big source of income, but at least it's fun!  I'll keep you posted.

2 comments:

mabills said...

HI, Mel! I clicked once, just for fun. I think you owe me 60 cents. ;-)

Melvyn Windham said...

Hmmm ... It doesn't seem to register. I wonder if it's really working every time someone clicks. Am I providing free advertising?

I may have to keep that in mind.