Comments on: AdSense on tecosystems

By: james governor

james governor — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:25:08 +0000

i take fraxas point. but dealing with questions of conflict of interest is always going to be an issue in the industry analyst business. and i am thinking a direct ad sell would be about 100 times more valuable than adwords. yes lets discuss this.

maybe i can see if i can get a sponsor, and we can trial it? maybe noone would be interested.

but i agree with you – running ads is indeed different from discussing a vendors products in an even handed fashion. thats why we can do it, potentially.

By: stephen o'grady

stephen o'grady — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 22:07:29 +0000

Anne: that was my thinking exactly. we’ll see if that’s mirrored by the regulars around here, but i personally think as long as they’re not obnoxious they should be forgivable.

James: that’s certainly an option, and nothing’s precluding us from doing that. i would worry, as Fraxas mentions, about conflict of interest issues simply b/c running ads is different then discussing a vendor’s products in an even handed fashion. let’s discuss it further.

Fraxas: you highlight exactly my concerns. and our ethical boundaries might be even more difficult to monitor closely then penny arcade’s.

By: Fraxas

Fraxas — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:41:07 +0000

Penny Arcade, http://www.penny-arcade.com , sells ad space directly to vendors. They’re a hugely popular webcomic that publishes 3x weekly and comments extensively on gaming. Their ads are all for games, and are personally vetted — but they still spend a relatively large amount of time dealing with percieved bias as a result. AdSense is good that way because you *don’t* have a lot of control over the content of the ad box; as soon as you start personally vetting ads, which you would want to do, I think, those ads become an implicit endorsement of the product. Which opens you to another avenue of criticism to which you have to respond.

By: james governor

james governor — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:31:41 +0000

hey stephen. if we’re going to run ads lets sell some to vendors and get a decent return.

By: Anne Zelenka

Anne Zelenka — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:27:41 +0000

I’ve been thinking about my own reluctance to put ads on my blogs and I’m getting closer to just doing it. I probably should have done it long ago, for all the hits I get on my Maui-related posts. It look like people planning a trip to Maui–I’m sure they’d click through on ads for Maui activities, restaurants, vacation rentals, etc.

Your regular readers won’t usually see them since they read you through the feed and click through only occasionally. On the other hand, people who find your site by a one-off search are likely to be looking for specific info on some software, possibly in the context of buying. So it seems like a good fit.

I wouldn’t put ads in my feeds either.