Bookshelf: the return of ads
Some readers may remember that 10stripe once experimented with ads powered by the Google Adsense network. We eventually concluded that the ads were more annoying and less useful to readers than we had originally hoped, and dropped them.
But ads are making something of a comeback at 10stripe, albeit in a different form. These new ads are different in several important ways:
- They will link to specific products at Amazon.com
- They will contain unobtrusive graphics (gasp!)
- We will have complete control over where the links go
Web ads, in general, suck. They are annoying, distracting, and rarely of any value. It was very important to us that our ads break that paradigm of "junk that readers dislike". In fact, what originally attracted us to Adsense (and later to Amazon's affiliate program) was the sense that the ads might actually be for things that readers would want to see.
Adsense ads mostly fell down on this point. Our content, it seems, was befuddling to Google's algorithms. A considerable number of the ads were for completely unrelated things. Those that were related were generally to sites like Intel.com (which is fine, but not generally helpful), or to retailers selling related products (again fine, although they often were not the highest-quality retailers). For these and other reasons, we dropped Adsense.
But a funny thing happened several days ago. I was reading something that mentioned Amazon Associates, Amazon's affiliate program. I ended up looking into it and finding that it actually looked like a decent program, and a good match for 10stripe.
So 10stripe will be gradually rolling out ads that show an Amazon.com product (including price) with a link to learn more about the product, and buy it if you like. Due to some of the idiosyncracies of our infrastructure, the ads will appear on a page-by-page basis, over the course of perhaps a week. If you want to see what they look like, glance over to the right side of this page.
Full details are available at Help: Bookshelf.