On our inaugural podcast, I speculated on whether or not Google would at some point choose to augment their primary existing revenue stream – advertising – with for pay services. Now, I’m turning that lens around just a bit, as I’ve decided to augment our for pay services with advertising revenue, having just added Google’s AdSense to this site (Cote and James don’t have it yet). Hit www.redmonk.com/sogrady, scroll halfway down and you should see them. When I asked you guys what you thought about ads last summer, the general consensus was on the site = ok, in the feeds = not so much, and you should all be happy to know that I’ve respected your wishes in this regard.
This is mostly an experiment, and certainly I don’t expect to drive any serious revenues out of the ads (especially placed where they are, but maybe I can get a three column layout that will fix that), but nor do I think they can hurt. If nothing else, they might defray some of our various hosting costs – or pay for a couple of beers at the Denver Tech Meetup. Longer term, I’m interested to see whether or not advertising can become anything more than pocket change in terms of our revenue model – or if it raises concerns or issues of some sort that we haven’t anticipated. Our primary revenue is and likely always will be paid subscriptions, but as we forgo traditional analyst revenue vehicles (commissioned reports and the like), we’re likely to be pretty open minded about alternative revenue sources – within strictly defined ethical boundaries, of course.
One thing you can be assured of, is that anything that is an ad will be marked as an ad. Our opinions will never be for sale, but AdSense? Hell, why not?
Anyway, if you’ve got concerns, issues or any comments I’d be interested in hearing them. And if you see anything weird in the ads themselves, definitely let me know. Otherwise, I hope you don’t find them too cumbersome.
