No Advertising

Now that blogs have become so popular, people developed special search engines for them, like Technorati or Google Blogsearch. These enabled me to find some other MMORPG blogs. And looking at them I noticed that most are having advertising on them, powered by Google AdSense.

Now I am not against advertising, and I am not an anti-capitalist. And the idea to have targeted advertising appeals to me, which not offer the visitors of a blog about lets say goldfish some unobtrusive ads for aquarium equipment? But my blog doesn't have advertising, and I have no plans at all to put any of them up, for several reasons:

1) The MMORPG companies I endorse don't use Google Adsense. And many of the companies that do use Google Adsense, I don't want to have anything to do with. Some Google ads I saw about MMORPG I would consider to be scams, especially those that offer to sell you all kind of secrets to easy leveling and gold. These "secrets" are either illegal exploits and will get you banned, or are just a worthless compilation of information you could have gotten for free elsewhere. Many Google Ads are about selling gold or accounts for real money (Real Money Trade, RMT). Now if you want to buy 100 gold in WoW for your level 40 mount, I have no personal problem with that. But be aware that such a transaction can get your account banned in WoW and in several other games, so I definitely don't want to have ads about RMT on this blog. And the last type of MMORPG ads are advertising small MMORPG games, most of which are frankly not very good. So as I would require that ads are useful to my readers, and MMORPG ads generally aren't, I don't use them.

2) Economics. Both Blogger and Blogspot are free, so neither managing nor hosting this blog costs me anything. I can easily recover zero cost with zero advertising revenues. :) Of course receiving large amounts of money for a small modification of my blog sounds tempting, but I have serious doubts that would work. I get just over 100 hits per day at the moment, and even if Google paid me $1 per CPM (thousand views), I'd only earn 10 cents a day. Google doesn't say how much exactly they are paying you unless you actually start putting up the ads, so if you have better information about how much you earn from your blog, I would like to know. But I have the impression that there are many blogs out there which never ever got over Google's $100 threshold, and thus never received any payment at all.

3) Credibility. I am not a journalist, I am "just" a blogger. The disadvantage for my readers is that whatever I write is just my personal opinion, and that I only write about what I play or think about at the moment. But the advantage is that whatever I write is my honest opinion, and not influenced by financial considerations. You can be sure that whatever I write about a game or a company is not influenced by them paying me. Mind you, what I write could still be wrong or just a mule-headed strange opinion, but at least it isn't bought. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:33 AM Permanent Link