Like the storm Katrina, the storm around Nuffnang has once again gathered strength. I don’t use Nuffnang (or its rival Advertlets) and I have not considered using them since I came to know about them from numerous ping.sg gatherings and reading the posts from many bloggers – primarily endoh – on them. After all, traffic to my blog is pretty low everyday so I don’t expect much income either. In fact, if not on Cris’ recommendation, I wouldn’t even have Google Ads on my blog.
So why did I put ads on my blog at all, when my friends, the nice people at Biz-Era, gave me completely free hosting (coupled with 24×7 support) out of goodwill?
Well, it’s because I hope to generate some income from the blog to cover my domain registration charges. And every US$100 is about S$150 which goes in to cover several years of that. In other words it doesn’t matter if it takes me several years to generate that amount of income at all. I ain’t looking to make loads with my blog as if my life depends on it anyway.
But why just Google Ads? The reasons are simple:
- Plug and play
Yep! Not plug and pray. Just sign up Google Ads, and stick the code into your blog and it starts serving ads right away completely hassle free, even though you might not exactly like the content of some of the ads it served. You also do not have to wonder why it isn’t serving ads and start praying that it serves ads soon. Neither do you need to question about the transparency in how blogs get selected to serve ads either. You might complain it doesn’t pay as well but no amount of extra money is worth the extra hassle, agony, heartbreaks and the implied insult that the content of your blog sucks. - No change in Blogging behaviour
My intention of having a blog is to write down my experiences (i.e. about places I visit, things I see), my opinion and views (on politics, or things that happen in my day-to-day life). In other words, I will write about anything that comes to mind, and I ain’t going to bother to change my blogging behaviour so that an advertiser finds my content nice enough to serve ads on it. I am not going to bend over backwards to try and get more traffic either. Like it or not, it is my considered opinion that to change my writing style is about the cyber-equivalent of mainland China prostitutes soliciting at the lorongs of Geylang. [靓仔！要去吗？] - Hassle Free Payment
Google may sometimes write you to protest certain suspicious clicks and demand an explanation (or else they’ll knock you off). That’s because of the controversy surrounding click-fraud which has constantly haunted the company. However, Google pays you once you made US$100 in earnings, no questions asked. On a specific day once every month, they will check if you should get equivalent of US$100 in local currency. If you do, a cheque mailed is mailed to your specified address and it should arrive in a few days. The payment system is rigid but there is no $1 surcharge nor lame excuses about costs etc. (Either way, to charge bloggers hosting your ads is the equivalent of an employer charging the employees for putting their wages into the bank.)
In other words, some may consider Google stingy for the amount it pays for the ads served, and it might take a really long time to get paid. But hey, what the hell do you expect for giving the minimum amount of effort without any impact to the way you blog? I do find it exceedingly amusing and hilarious that some bloggers change their blogging style to get ads. But then, as long as I don’t end up reading the their mental masturbation, everyone is free to prostitute their blogs as source of constant income for all I cared.
