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Why do I have ads on my pages?Elusive online advertising revenue - opinions by Jason Buchanan |
The revenue generated from ads on all of the sites I manage is roughly $0.01 a day in 2019. This revenue definitely does not cover the cost of hosting this site. But, there are interesting insights of where and how people visit the various pages I have written. If I didn't put any ads on the pages the client's web browser and IP address says quite a bit - I used to mine my webserver logs for this information but it's far easier to slap a Google ad on my page and let Google do all the work.
I don't want to know who is visiting a page nor am I interested in anything that would resemble the client's personally-identifiable information (PII). If someone wants to send an email to me that's a different topic.
If it's not for the money... tell me, how did you ever get the idea to put ads on your pages?
Short answer: the ads and analytics provide a way to understand what pages are popular (intriguing content = more page views, boring/uninteresting content = fewer page views) and help me predict what I might want to add to a page or to a site. Your activity is tracked just as much whether I put an ad on a page or not, if you don't use incognito mode or private browsing.
I try to place the ads on the page in a non-intrusive way that doesn't distract or interfere with the content - a little ad in the upper right and a banner ad on the bottom of the page should be tolerable :-) Who knows, maybe a useful ad will appear and you will benefit from it.