Bloggin Questions–cleaner look vs. revenue?

Thinking about the lure of lucre vs the clean look of the blog. On our website, gonomad.com, we include many google ads, that match up with the content. this program is what has made Sergie Brin and Larry Page into billionaires, these little green ads that appear on the sides of stories and at the bottom of most newspaper’s websites. intelligently matching the content of the pages with keywords purchased by advertisers. It brings in hundreds for the websites and millions for google. I’ve signed up and been approved but i can’t yet bring myself to put google ads on this blog. it is so clean and uncluttered, this design is too nice to mess with.

I’ve liked the way these ads look on the gonomad pages, and always delight in how a story about Brazil will show ads for Rio hotels, and a story on how to pack a suitcase will have charming little suitcase ads next to it. The next new development we’ve seen is from Amazon. They’ve caught on to Google’s content matching scheme, and now our ads for Amazon are boxes with books related to the story. Just by popping in the code and a word, we can get ads for karate for our feature on kickboxing in thailand and presumably that will sell more books since it matches the story. We sell many, many books on Amazon, but sadly, the payment per book is less than $.75 in some cases, so we don’t make much. But in the internet business, little things eventually add up.