debuggable

Update: The first advertisment deal is on it's away and I added a new page for people interested in Advertising on ThinkingPHP.org. Feel free to contact me for more information.

I was spending some time today thinking about whether AdSense is the best way of making some money with my blog. It didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that while it's an easy to maintain system, it's probably also way too mainstream for what I'm doing here.

Looking at the ads that show up here daily, I'm wondering why I actually do get a couple clicks every once and a while. I mean most of you don't do Java or .Net programming, and probably the last thing you want is a crappy commercial AJAX framework. So all of those Ads are a waste of your time reading this blog, and my time maintaining it. Some of the ads like the ones for php editors, conferences or web testing are alright, but other than that Google isn't serving me well at all.

Considering that my blog has recently gained a good bit of additional popularity measured by feedburner subscriptions, Google Analytics reports and Alexa rankings, it's a bit frustrating that it isn't generating more then ~$40 a month. Of course, I don't have the kind of traffic like the really big sites do have, but what I've got is a very special audience, made up of highly skilled individuals that are really into what they are doing. So by using a mainstream advertisment plattform like AdSense, I feel like wasting the potential of this site.

Enough whining, what I would like to do in future, is to make individual contracts with people who really want to reach the specific audience of this blog. I am open for a very wide range of advertisement. The new design will offer a really nice big space on the top left that could be filled with a nice graphic or eventually flash (nothing too annoying so). There is also room for text links in the right navigation, or Ads in the content section. Or if you would be interested to put advertisment inside of my RSS feed, that would give me a good reason to go back to full feed content, which I stopped doing because feedburner wasn't downloading my feed when it got bigger then 512kb anymore. Besides that, I would be willing to do interviews, write tutorials or review products for a certain charge. All of those would be labeled as sponsored content and I'll not write praises about things that I think are bad and that I wouldn't use myself. However, if you have written a good (web) application, want to promote your services as a web developer / company, or have another interesting thing you want to get a little buzz for, this could be your chance. My only requirement is that your product/service/whatever at is somewhat relevant to the content of this blog, at least more then the current AdSense ads are.

So if all of this sounds interesting to you, and you want to reach a more specific Audience than AdWords can offer, feel free to contact me. Considering on what I'm earning with AdSense right now, you could probably make a really good deal if you contact me fast ; ).

And in case I've gotten slightly nuts by the recent traffic growth and no requests will get into my inbox, you all will probably continue to see those boring google ads *sigh* ; ).

--Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined