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Added Google AdSense to Paste App
By Jacob Cohen | March 9, 2007
For a long time I was against the idea of advertising on my site. I didn’t want to have flashing banner ads or “Punch the Monkey” games or anything like that getting in the way of what people were trying to do.
However, I’d like to at least help defray the cost of running the site. I think I can do this with subtle AdSense ads on the bottom of pasted code pages. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just take it back down, no huge effort wasted on my part.
So I’ve added a basic linkbox ad space to the bottom of each pasted page, and made the color scheme as subtle as possible. Hopefully this does not detract from the experience of pasting code on the site. Since it uses Javascript to load the ad content, it does not seem to affect the page weight in any noticeable fashion.
I am hoping that AdSense will be able to find relevant ads to serve based on the contents of the pasted code, because that’s the only real reason it would ever be worth having them there. So far it doesn’t seem to be finding much, but I’ll give it a while and see if it improves.
Update: I’ve taken this back down. I was hoping to get content relevant to the pasted code to appear, but these pages are too ephemeral. The crawler indexes a particular page, and then ads can be served based on the content of that page. Since each new paste gets a new URL and expires after 24 hours, this effectively means the likelihood of there being any relevant ads is nearly zero. I’ll probably try something like Adbrite next.
Topics: General |
