I felt it necessary to share a few minor ad-related updates with all of you.
Site-Wide
I’m really not into the whole in-your-face ad scene. You won’t see site-wide skins, contextual pop-ups, blocks of ads injected into posts, sponsored posts, or anything too obnoxious.
ToolGuyd’s sidebar currently features two 300x250px ad blocks (served via Google Adsense at the moment), and you typically won’t see much more than that. Things might change a little around the winter holidays, but any modifications will be unobtrusive, tactful, and short-lived.
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As always, your feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Videos
The primary reason for this post is to announce that I have decided to monetize ToolGuyd’s YouTube video reviews and previews. This is something I absolutely never wanted to do, but it seems like Google is giving unfair focus to ad partners and monetized videos.
Featured Videos are not advertisements or paid placements, but do feature content from partners with whom we have a commercial relationship.
It looks like I will have complete control over individual videos so what I will probably do is keep all new videos ad-free for a set amount of time (2-weeks?) to keep the viewing experience for readers and subscribers unchanged. Or I might do a 180 and kill all of the ads entirely, right now I’m on the fence.
I will continue to focus on written reviews and still images, but will try to work videos into the mix. I’m not the best speaker, but ToolGuyd is maybe 10 years away from being able to hire new talent.
RSS
A while back I enabled Google ads via RSS, and there is no way to undo this. I finally reached someone at Google, and it seems that the only possible way to get rid of the ads at the bottom of ToolGuyd’s RSS feed is to kill the feed and start over. They are currently set to the lowest frequency and a dull hopefully easily-ignorable color. I’m still working on removing ads from the feeds, but it has been a tricky and frustrating process.
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Sponsorship
I may soon reach out to select brands to discuss sponsorship options. Or not, I have not decided yet. The truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things I want to do in terms of content creation to make ToolGuyd a bigger and better resource for a wider audience, but without sponsorship support, the plans will continue to be back-burnered for a couple of more years.
As mentioned above, I’m not a fan of in-your-face and obtrusive ads. If I were I could easily double or triple ad funds and support for future projects. But in doing so I would turn ToolGuyd into a place I wouldn’t want to visit myself. What would be the point in that?
Again, your feedback is most welcome and appreciated.
Jerry
I have no problem with an ad in a video, as long as no one gets carried away with it. Maybe a brief written review, and the video would be for demonstrations or more in depth info.
One reason I come here is the honest reviews without a lot of clutter. However, if an ad here and there helps you out, by all means, do it, unless you like charity work.
Stuart
Thanks for the feedback!
With video ads of the type I enabled this morning, everything is handled by Google. All I can essentially do is check “yes” or “no.”