New Ad in Town

I’m afraid this post is going to be about money. I say “afraid,” because I don’t think my money concerns and ambitions are as important to you as they are to me.

But this is also about you and what a wonderful person you are, which might pique your interest.

(And I have advertisers covered also–please read on to “What’s in it for you advertisers?” for why I think this is a good site for you, even if it’s about free stuff. And I’m not excluding you from the wonderful person category.)

I noticed via TechCrunch that Performancing has a new ad network, so on a lark I decided to sign up. The “house ad” is currently running in the left sidebar. They have an auto-pricing mechanism and I’ve just had my first price set at $18/month. Not too bad for this embryonic site, and I think it will go up along with the monthly traffic estimate over the next few days.

I may end up setting my own price at a higher rate, for reasons I’ll mention in the “advertisers” section below. Still, even after Performancing’s 30% cut, at that rate I’d be looking at $150/year. About enough to cover my current hosting and registrar expenses. That would be nice. Of course, I would have to actually sell some ads, which is far from certain.

But first…

What’s in it for you readers?

If you like this blog and what I’m doing here, you may want to see more writing from me. Even if I’m doing it for the love it–and I am–I still need to make a living. If I could miraculously make a lot of money at this, I would write and promote freedom much more. Hell, I’d have time to write and learn about and use free software. That would make me happy, and potentially you as well. (If you like the site, of course.) Advertising is one of the things that can help make that happen.

I have mixed feelings about advertising. So much of it is obnoxious. But there are things out there we’d be interested in if we knew more about them, so it can serve a useful purpose. Unobtrusive advertising can be a “win-win-win” situation. (Please know that I’m not the kind of person who says win-win-win un-ironically. Any watchers of The Office out there? Loved the win-win-win episode here.) My hope is that everyone will benefit from ads on this site: readers, if you find something useful through them or just that they support this site and your enjoyment of it; advertisers, if you can reach people and make your pitch; and me, if I can make a buck.

Finally, if you’re a blogger yourself and follow one of the links in this post back to Performancing and sign up, you might make some money yourself, and I’ll get a 5% referral bonus out of Performancing’s 30% cut for your site.

What’s in it for you advertisers?

For potential advertisers out there, the simple fact is that movingtofreedom.org draws a highly intelligent and almost certainly more-attractive-than-average demographic, full of clear winners in the gene pool.

Yes, the site is about free software, but we stress that we’re most interested in freedom of speech, not beer. By advertising here, you will reach a smart group of people in the technology industry and elsewhere that has money to spend on quality products.

At the initial writing of this post in October of 2006, the site is fairly young, but the number of unique visitors and regular subscribers is steadily rising. I write a weekly blog entry for Free Software Magazine, a highly ranked site that has a good readership and provides a growing number of readers to this site. Two of my recent articles there have been “dugg,” attracting even more visitors to this site.

I care about making this a quality site with good content, which I think you can see for yourself by looking around. I’d love to have you as a sponsor, and I hope you see the value in advertising here.

And that’s probably enough for the sales pitch.

Initial Thoughts on Performancing

So what do I think about Performancing, now that I’ve promoted the service at such length?

My early impression is favorable. The HTML snippet to serve the ads worked fine for me, but it didn’t validate as XHTML 1.0. They’ve been responsive about fixing that. So far, things seem to be working well technically.

There are a couple of things I’m not so sure about.

I don’t really care for the popup box you get when you mouse over the ad, but it’s not all that big, and it seems well-behaved about going away when you move the mouse. I’ll be watching to see if it starts growing. I hope it doesn’t put anybody off too much.

It looks like these guys are affiliated with Text Link Ads. At least, according to the site, one of the Performancing co-founders runs TLA. I don’t know how closely connected the two outfits are. That raises some concern for me, since I don’t agree with the TLA link selling approach. I’m not aware of anything about the Performancing service that might be a problem. I haven’t brought it up in their forum for fear of being flamed. That’s too strong a word. They’re very cordial over there. I just don’t think skepticism about TLA and associated concern about Performancing will be warmly greeted, and I don’t want to argue about it there. So I’ll keep my eyes out, and please let me know if you’re aware of any grey areas.

The big question is if they’ll get advertisers. Being open to any publisher is nice for a newbie like me, but do I really want to be a part of a club that will have me as a member?* I’ve been checking out several of the blogs signing up and there are quite a few low-value, spamtastic sites. (Of course not yours specifically, if you’re a Performancing Partner reading this.) Will it degrade the brand if the placeholder ad is showing up on all kinds of crufty blogs?

What do you think

Please put your $0.02 in. (Oops, there I go again, looking for money!)

Is it unbearably tedious for you regular readers to encounter a post like this? It’s not totally off topic though, is it? We have to find ways to pay for free culture and a free society, after all.

How about the Text Link Ads question? I’ve seen where that stirs up a lot of heated debate. I’d be happy to share the reasons why I don’t think they’re a good idea, if anyone wants to discuss civilly. I don’t think that the folks at TLA or the people who use them are bad people, I just disagree about the desirability of that method of link selling.