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28 October 2007
A friend ordered a bag of Kona Earth 100% Kona Coffee today.
That's nothing new, he's purchased coffee from us before. While
ordering his coffee he also took a moment to read the latest web postings.
That's not unusual either, many of our regular customers like to keep
up on the latest happenings around the farm. What made this visit
from my friend different is he clicked on several of the ads at the
bottom of the page. I don't know why he did that, maybe he saw
something he was interested in or maybe he was in the mood to go
shopping.
Kona Earth receives a few cents every time someone clicks on one of the ads
on this website. I don't keep very close track but this time I decided
to look it up. My friend was the only one to click on any of the ads
today and his clicking generated $1.56 in ad revenue. $1.56 isn't
all that much, what makes is significant is that it pushed my account
total across the $100 minimum for getting paid. It took nearly
two years but hopefully soon I will receive my first ever earnings from
advertisements on KonaEarth.com.
Most websites don't make much money from advertising but some do.
The most extreme case I've heard of is a guy that makes over $100,000
per month from online ads. Of course I've also heard of people
getting rich from playing blackjack in Vegas or selling cosmetics for
Avon. In general, programs like Google AdSense benefit Google
more than they benefit the advertiser or publisher.
There are ways to cheat the system. The easiest cheat is to host
a bunch of ads then get all your friends or a computer program to click
on the ads repeatedly. This is called Click Fraud and it is a
felony in some jurisdictions because it is effectively stealing from
the advertisers. The problem is that it's not always clear what
is fraud and what isn't.
Google has rules concerning click fraud. Google allows text such
as "Sponsored Links" and "Advertisements" but prohibits phrases such as
"Click on my ads", "Support our sponsors", or "Favorite Sites".
Arrows pointing to the ads are prohibited yet coloring the ads to match
the rest of the page and placing the ads in the middle of legitimate
text is actually encouraged. Google publishes a long list of
optimization techniques including a heat map that shows where to place
ads on the page for the best performance. In my opinion, many of
the "optimizations" are designed to trick people into clicking on ads they
aren't really interested in. Is it click fraud if the user clicks on
an ad unintentionally because he or she didn't know it was an ad?
I've never liked advertising. From a consumer perspective I hate
being constantly bombarded by misleading and annoying ads. From a
merchant perspective I've found the cost of advertising to be greater
than the revenue it generates. Some advertising is useful but in
general I prefer to concentrate on product quality rather than heavy
marketing.
I resisted the urge to place external ads on this website but in the
end I decided it could be done harmlessly. The ads from Google
and Yahoo are context sensitive which means they use keywords from the
page to decide which ads to display. For example a page about
fishing has ads about fishing while a page about fertilizer has ads
about fertilizer. The ads from Amazon are cookie based (a cookie
is like a nametag that Amazon uses to remember who you are). If
you've ever shopped at Amazon then their ad server remembers who you
are and serves ads based on your shopping history.
If there aren't enough relevant ads available then ads about coffee are
used. This means there are sometimes ads for our
competitors. I can block ads from specific competitors but
decided that wasn't necessary for several reasons. First, I feel
that people will comparison shop with or without ads for
competitors. Second, our coffee is better than any of the
competition's so comparison shopping is a good. Finally, most
people ignore the ads anyways and I have the statistics to prove it.
The ads at the bottom of the page are going to stay there for now.
They don't generate much money but they don't hurt anything either.
Advertisers want you to click on their ads as long as you don't click
repeatedly for no good reason. So feel free to click on the ads or
ignore them, it is totally up to you. Just make sure you buy
some Kona Earth coffee while you're at it.
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