Google Advertising

Mike and Dan asked me why I had advertising. I'm not sure how long ago, a couple of years, I started reading Living Room. Darren Rowse was a church planter in Australia, and we seemed to have some in common. We even conversed a bit by email. It wasn't too long after that he changed the way he blogged for the purpose of seeing if he could make a living. It wasn't a terrible change, but it lost the edge of planting that drew me to it. He was looking for a larger audience.

If I hadn't had some relationship (no doubt very limited) with Darren, I don't think I would have believed it when he announced recently that he made over $100,000 last year blogging. You can check out Problogger if you want. I don't know all the details but I know he started several different blogs with different topics, such as one that talked about lomo photography, which was a special interest to him. I think that has been the focus, to start blogs that reflect his own interests, in which advertising allows for the selling of a product, such as a camera.

You can certainly question my motives, but I was curious about how Google Adsense worked. I read on it, but just wasn't feeling like I understood the depth of it, so I decided to simply add Google Adsense to my blog and watch it work and learn through the experience.

For the most part, the ads have been either about American Idol or some religious nuttiness. When I last looked, there was an ad for a poster of teenage Jesus, which while I'm open to art, I would have to say this art is somewhat offensive. I don't think most people would "take away" what the artist says is there.

The other ad was for Unitarians.

I suppose the question is "Does it look like I support what is advertised?" I imagine it does. I don't. Do I want to make money helping the guy sell "Teenage Jesus?" I don't. Am I going to delete the ads? No. I'm not. And the reason is because we live in such a media saturated environment, we absolutely have to learn to filter our media.