I am doing a little experiment with advertising on this site. I have signed up for Google Adsense and if my site is accepted, I will add some code to make some targeted ads start showing up. I am only doing this to to see if I can’t start getting to break-even with this server. Currently I host about 10 websites on this server and I pay about $150 a month for the internet service and electricity.
It’s not a big deal that I host so many other sites for free because I would be running the server anyway. Although, there is one site that consistantly uses almost half of my monthly bandwidth…
I just read that the average person spends 30% of their “media-consuming” time on the internet. Advertising spending is not yet up that far, but it probably will be sometime soon.
I picked Adsense because the ads are not that intrusive, they don’t have some big flash animation or a pop-up/under, and they are generally pretty relevent. They also allow both styles, the pay-per-click and the pay-per-impression. I suspect that the impression concept will be the best here.
Most visitors will see very little change other than a google search bar. If Adsense can get me even $20 a month, I think it will be worth it. Heck, I may even have to start doing more content, which might be more enjoyable to everyone. Who knows…