This post won’t be about photography or about programming, although it does relate to computers. Today a blogger (Peter Bernik) who I read very often posted a really funny announcment he got from another site about the “Nikon D3″. The blog is really great, and I keep it in my RSS reader right at the top. However, recently he had three posts about ads and money: Moving up to the next blogging level, Blog monetizing and How much is your blog worth?. And this post is full of floating ads. Now I’m all for the bloggers to make some money of their blogs, heck, even I want to put ads online someday (but I’m waiting for Wordress to offer the plug-in)… After all, it’s their personal hobby, something they do in their free time and it’s only fair that they can make some money off it right?

What I don’t like however is forcing a gazillion ads once you see there’s a possibility to make some money. What’s going to happen there is people will start considering you as a greedy person and basically stop coming to the blog. This means the revenue stream will decrease and you will be inclined to put even more ads online thinking that this is how you might solve the problem.

I also have this problemhabbit of scrolling through text that I’m reading with my mouse/pen. I find even the Snap Preview links on my blog annoying when doing this and I’m going to turn them off really soon, but I find ads even worse. Especially those floating ones. The ones where they take keywords and change it to appear as a link. I find that it also confuses the reader (yes, I know that it’s double subscripted but it still looks like a link!). If you include links in your posts (like this one here), how can a reader know where to click?

So all this rambling has to have a point — and it does. Blogs are about opinion, about expressing yourself and your work. It’s acceptable to use them to make some money to help support your work. Jonas Ž., the well known blogger, has long since made some money with the blog. Jonas’ blog is worth, according to the link Peter posted on his blog, $186,298.20. Ok, sure, the numbers don’t mean anything untill you get an offer. But that’s a HUGE amount of money. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, to all who are reading this and are thinking of filling the blog with ads, don’t. It might make you money in the short run, but it will cost you readers in the long run. Put up a few ads, be honest about it, tell the readers why, but don’t be greedy.

Disclaimer: Although it may seem that this post is a direct attack on Peter, it’s not. I just ”used” him and his recent actions as an introduction to this post. I’m sorry if it seems that way. I still respect Peter and his work and plan to continue reading his blog as long as the ads don’t get in my way.