Survival Arts

I've been wondering this myself. It is cheap enough to do -- it probably can't hurt. Try it and let us know. :)

I'll probably take the plunge and try it, maybe starting Wednesday or so.

The fact that it's syndicated by Google doesn't make it any different than an Overture ad (whose format Google stole). Google's computers put your pages in a category and serve up ads, you get paid some cents per click.
I've blocked all adverts from showing up. TV spots are entertaining, but $0.05 isn't worth it to sacrifice the commercial-free sanctity of a site.

Its really cheap if you choose reasonably obscure keywords. We did it for the ABL.

I don't see why not, it won't detract from your material.

And Daniel, what's this about 'commercial free sanctity'? You sound as if seeing an ad is some sort of personal violation. Surely most of us are of the generation born with pre-installed ad filters:)

I don't see any reason not to. As long as it's not too obtrusive the ads usually don't bother me. Of course, I use the Adblock extension in Firefox to block all of the images in the ads so they don't appear.

I'm not sure all of us are talking about the same thing. I'm referring to the text-only AdSense links that are served up by Google that you see in places like Multiply. It would be implemented to look a bit like the adroll on the Foresight Insitute's front page:

http://www.foresight.org/

No ad _images_ to block. At least in the case of the Foresight ads, some of them actually look interesting to the readership.

Daniel: what, specifically, do you have against the concept of making money?

I get about $200/year on a site that draws roughly 1000 ad-views daily. That is, there are 1000 pages viewed each day which have ads (I don't have ads on image-only pages, for example).

The most profitable PAGES are those which have a fairly tight focus, so the ads are very targeted, and which lead people to click-through most reliably. Makes sense, but not something that people think of right away when looking at something like google's ads.

The other thing to consider is that their TOS say they don't do ads on blogs. What that means (from what I can see) is that you have to have enough content that isn't of the "today I ate a cheese sandwich" variety to make it worthwhile for them to serve the ads. Luckily, they already know whether you've got that kind of site or not, so it only takes a couple days to turn around the application.

Dave, this is very useful to know, and I appreciate your sharing of your revenue number with us. Thanks!

It'll be interesting to see if Google accepts my site despite the "no blogs" policy.

I got rejected for Google's Adwords, because the two sites I was promoting "advocated violence" and "promoted guns".
These sites were Common Sense in Self Defence (site calling for laws that favour the victim) and the Sportsman's Association (organization representing shooters rights).
These were ads that I was going to pay for, so that gives you some idea what Google stand for.
See http://www.cssd.org.uk for the full story.