Capitalist Pig-Dog

After upgrad­ing the site yes­ter­day, I installed a spe­cial thingy to show me sta­tis­tics about who visits the weblog, what they read while they’re here and what links they click on.

I haven’t had a system like this in place for years, and was quite sur­prised this morn­ing by the stats. Many more people visit the site than I thought, and cer­tain posts — the one about casu­als, the one about col­lapsed lungs, and any­thing about how to do stuff on a com­puter — actu­ally get a decent number of hits each day, from real live humans, as best as I can tell.

So, I thought I’d try a little exper­i­ment and… add some adver­tise­ments to the site. You know, so I can profit from foot­ball hooli­gans arrang­ing fights and unwell Amer­i­cans with­out health insur­ance. Might as well go the whole hog, eh?

Of course, this is wrong and bad and I should kill myself at the first avail­able oppor­tu­nity, so, to salve the ter­ri­ble guilt, if I make more money than it takes to pay my host­ing and domain reg­is­tra­tion fees (around £60 a year, I think), I’ll give it to charity.

I don’t want folk who actively read the site to be trou­bled by these ever-​so-​discreet tex­tual intru­sions of Mammon, so, just in case you’re not already block­ing them, adverts will only appear below entries a week after they’ve been posted, and will never appear in RSS feeds or on the home page.

Here’s what they look like:

What do you reckon, then? Sen­si­ble plan, or revolt­ing act?

Posted at 1pm on 14/03/08 by Jack Mottram to the site news category.
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Tags: advertising, google, meta