Advertising a dilemma

I was just approached about letting someone post ads on select pages of my blog. I haven’t taken advertising and I have to say, being offered $20 a page, one-time fee, sounds like not a lot of money (though it would probably take a long time for one of my pages to make $20 from AdSense or some other such program).

I asked some writer friends what they thought. The first one to respond asked why I didn’t use Google in the first place. I said I thought it would be weird to write about Google while receiving checks, even small ones, from it. He said that since Google was an automated ad system, it effectively was like the wall between business and editorial in a typical magazine. Maybe he’s right.

On the other hand, Tom Foremski in his Silicon Valley Watcher blog has a cunning take on why content producers should never use AdSense: “By running AdSense you are undermining your efforts to charge a meaningful amount for online advertising….Google can sell ads at a low cost because it doesn’t pay for the content.”

He concludes by saying “Shut off AdSense if you pay editors and writers to create content and want to make a living from online advertising, imho.”

See Reasons Why Media and Bloggers Should Not Run Google AdSense

Then again, banner ads aren’t exactly making anyone forget a full-page ad in a print publication, either.