So I'm sure many of you by now have noticed the new advertisements on this blog, replacing the Google AdSense ads I had previously. I know a lot of you are curious as to how well Google ads can perform, or maybe are just curious why I made the switch, so I thought I might share my (brief) personal experience with Adsense with you.

Basically, if you're not familiar as to how they work, Google AdSense in a nutshell is a service for webmasters to easily hook up with advertisers. You apply for the program, and once you're in, you stick in a bit of code and Google sends out a spider, figures out what's on your page, and serves you a relevant text (or image) ad as best as it can. There's a lot more to it, but I won't go into details. I recommend this page for more details.

In the past, web advertising has been a difficult thing for the vast majority of webmasters, bloggers, etc. to set up. Unless you had connections with potential advertisers, you were stuck with no ad revenue, or forced to use an ad service that would place totally irrelevant (and obnoxious) ads on your site. Google AdSense fixes a lot of these problems, hookng up literally millions of advertisers with content creators. It's sort of like how Ebay hooks up sellers and buyers, but with near total automation.

So having read about this in the entertaining read, The Google Story by David Vise, I was ready to jump in and try them out with this blog, to pay for hosting and provide a bit of financial incentive to continue with great content for the blog. Averaging something like 25,000 visits a day, I expected that AdSense would bring in a fair amount. Ultimately, I ended up being disappointed. Often the ads Google would bring up were pretty irrelevant. It would pick up, say, "DVD encoding" from the Handbrake article, and bring up ads for PC DVD ripping software. Or it would bring up an ad to save endangered species on the Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest post. And there were a whole lot of Toshiba 2-Day Printer Sale advertisements. No idea where those came from.

So, basically, I was unhappy with AdSense. With the ads they were serving up, the money they were bringing in, and the overall aesthetics. End story? I've decided to go with a custom ad serving system (special thanks to my friend Scott Meinzer coding it up in about 3 hours), and bring in relevant advertisers myself. In just about two days, six advertisers are on board, and I think the result is in everyone's best interest. On my part, I can ensure that I am supporting the site and myself with ads for applications I use, and ads that look good, and in the end, feel comfortable about sinking in a lot of time to come up with interesting blog entries. For the advertisers, they can directly advertise on my blog if they like the outlet without going through a middle-man (Google). For you, the reader, you benefit from prettier ads for Mac software that pass with my implicit badge of approval, and in addition, you can even take advantage of some special, exclusive deals. (You may've noticed the $3 off AppZapper coupon code, and now the $15 off for RapidWeaver. And you'll see a really neat one coming in a few days, a MacZot ad that'll update automatically everyday with the newest deals.)

So, to wrap things up, for my personal situation and tastes, AdSense bad, custom advertisers good. Hope you feel the same.