More Thoughts on Selling Ads On My Blog

My experimentation with advertisement on this blog is so far so good. Even though I haven’t had any clients coming to me to book a spot, I have ads in the lineup in the next couple of weeks. These ads are the result of cold emails. It felt kind of awkward reaching out to potential advertisers who I have known asking to advertise on my site.

The first email I sent out, I felt immediate regret. Would the potential advertiser think I am being greedy? Would the potential advertiser think selling ads on my blog is silly? I kept checking my email to see if the advertiser had responded. To my surprise, the advertiser gave a positive response and was willing to schedule for two to three weeks. That reply gave me confidence to reach out to another one, and another one, and one more. So far, they have been supportive of my advertisement plan.

Why am I selling ads anyway? Obviously, it is not about the money because the price is quite low. I like ads when they are done well, especially high-quality ads in print magazines. The web has a bad rep for advertisement from the start and it is just getting worse. Advertisement on the web has been intrusive, annoying, and just creepy. Ads on the web interrupt the reading experience, slow down the website performance to a crawl, and invade users’ privacy. I don’t want any of that and I want to change all of that. I do not use any tracking. I have no Google Analytics. The only analytic I can see is through CloudFlare’s web traffic. I want to bring high-quality ads to the web. I am glad someone gets it. Sophia Lucero tweeted about this week’s ad:

as one who has a site with a sorta similar split layout / image sidebar, this is a refreshing & honest take on promoting

Before I decided to sell my own ads directly, I wanted to join Carbon Ads. Based on my monthly pageviews, I seemed to qualify. Unfortunately, I have not heard back from them about my application. It could be that my blog is not specific to design or development. I blog about anything under the sun. My experiment with sell ads directly is inspired by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball’s weekly sponsorships. He’s pulling $7,500 a week and he has consistently done week after week for many years. I am obviously not shooting for the moon here. If I can make a third of what he is making, I would quit my full-time job in a heartbeat. I don’t think I can make more than 50 bucks a week, but that’s good enough for me to cover the hosting and domain renewal expenses. That’s all I am aiming for.