As you probably notice, now this blog is monetized (with AdSense). Blogger has a 'press here to place ads' button, which is pretty handy, and so I clicked it a few months ago. They are not enabled immediately, AdSense need to review the site first, and since it has some requirements (an important one is that the site must be 6 months old or more) they weren't active until now.
What does this mean for you? Well...now you will see ads here, and so I'll earn a bit of money for my developer work, which is fine. I hope they are not very intrusive. In fact, although almost all settings are set to the default ones (so I guess they are ok), I changed some of them because they were awfully obtrusive:
- By default, ads are shown on the lateral bar (top and bottom of the page in mobile) and also between posts. The lateral bar is fine in my opinion, they don't distract (and in mobile they disappear as soon as you start scrolling). But placing them between posts is, again in my opinion, an awful decision because you can mistakenly think an ad is a post, and that should never happen (if you click on an ad you should know you are clicking on an ad). That's the reason I changed it to shown on the lateral bar only.
- The other recommended setting is to place 'dynamic size' ads, which means that 'the ad size will be adapted to the screen size'. This sounds like the better option, if you have a big screen a small ad can be missed, and if you have a small screen a big ad is just wrong. So dynamic size seems fine...except it is not. I discovered that the ads were shown almost always in the 'big' size, and although in desktop mode (lateral bar) it doesn't really matter, while browsing on a mobile device the ads occupied around 40% of the screen size! Inconceivable. I quickly changed them to the minimum-height one in the horizontal types (half banner 234x60), I hope they are not very small on big screens.
- By default, ads are shown on the lateral bar (top and bottom of the page in mobile) and also between posts. The lateral bar is fine in my opinion, they don't distract (and in mobile they disappear as soon as you start scrolling). But placing them between posts is, again in my opinion, an awful decision because you can mistakenly think an ad is a post, and that should never happen (if you click on an ad you should know you are clicking on an ad). That's the reason I changed it to shown on the lateral bar only.
- The other recommended setting is to place 'dynamic size' ads, which means that 'the ad size will be adapted to the screen size'. This sounds like the better option, if you have a big screen a small ad can be missed, and if you have a small screen a big ad is just wrong. So dynamic size seems fine...except it is not. I discovered that the ads were shown almost always in the 'big' size, and although in desktop mode (lateral bar) it doesn't really matter, while browsing on a mobile device the ads occupied around 40% of the screen size! Inconceivable. I quickly changed them to the minimum-height one in the horizontal types (half banner 234x60), I hope they are not very small on big screens.
And that is all. Ads are an important part of the internet life nowadays, but they are often used wrong. My opinion on ads is: Ads are useful, they allow you to discover new and interesting things that otherwise will probably be unnoticed, however they must follow three rules:
1) You need to know what is an ad and what is not.
2) They can't interfere in the normal use of the service you are using.
3) If you click on an ad is because you decided to click the ad by yourself (because you found it useful) and not because you 'missed the X button', clicked on another unrelated thing, or anything else.
I know my decisions will probably reduce the amount of money I'll get, but I'm ok if that means I'm providing a better service.
1) You need to know what is an ad and what is not.
2) They can't interfere in the normal use of the service you are using.
3) If you click on an ad is because you decided to click the ad by yourself (because you found it useful) and not because you 'missed the X button', clicked on another unrelated thing, or anything else.
I know my decisions will probably reduce the amount of money I'll get, but I'm ok if that means I'm providing a better service.
Any questions/concerns/suggestions about this? You can say so in the comments or send me an email.
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