Advertising on small publishing projects

1. You have a great deal of control over the look of the ad. The one ad we do feature on the main page and individual archives blends in fairly seamlessly with the design and doesn't disrupt the flow of the content. But it's also not hidden to the point of undermining the fundamental purpose of putting the ad there.

2. The ads tend to be relevant. They are usually about coffee (especially on the review pages). Which is a good thing because our site is about coffee. As it turns out, coffee ads also tend to be interesting since there aren't too many shady companies connected with selling coffee. Chances are the site behind a coffee ad has some interesting content.

3. The Yahoo backend is nicer than the Google Adsense backend. It's cleaner, easier to use and quicker at getting you information on earnings and generating reports. It's also more real-time than Google, which can delay reporting by several hours. The click-through rate also seems to be higher. For example, we had one click generate $1.38. That's like three days of food for Bruce and me.

This all begs the question: Why did we put ads on the site in the first place? In a company as small as we are with profit margins this slim, any way to pull in a few extra bucks to cover basic online expenses — hosting, servers, stats software, etc. — is a great plus. If we can at the very least recoup server and hosting expenses for our current projects, then that's more money to put towards new projects and books. And if we can generate that money without turning people off, then that's a good thing.

Apparently telling you guys to go and click the ads on the site is a big no-no in the Rule Book of Yahoo Ads. So I'll just leave you with this: if you want us to feed David in his box, investigating products that may appear on our site is one way to peripherally provide for the gruel which we periodically throw at him with a shovel.

EDIT (10-24-05): Just a quick note of clarification: When I say "We decided to go with Yahoo ads (over Google) on the Canned Coffee site for several reasons:" I do not mean to imply the reasons which followed are why we used Yahoo over Google.

I probably should have written, "We decided to go with Yahoo ads over Google ads. The reasons we decided to put any ads at all on the Canned Coffee site are:"

It's true, Yahoo and Google ads both look almost identical and they're both usually very relevant to the content. Yahoo, in my opinion, does have a nicer backend but other than that (and an ostensibly higher per-click-pay) they're virtually identical services.