I have an interesting conundrum on this, the third anniversary of the birth of this blog. For the first and second times ever, this past week I have received inquiries about placing advertisements on specific posts on my blog. The ads would be for products or websites that relate to posts I already made that must be ranking highly enough that the advertisers think they'll generate some traffic.
For just over a year I've been running Google ads on this blog, and as I'd hoped the revenue just covers the costs I incur with TypePad (my blogging and hosting service). My logic was that a majority of my readers get my content via RSS and thus wouldn't be bothered by the ads (nor contribute in any way to the revenue as it's only generated by page-views or click-throughs), but anybody finding my site on a one-shot deal via a search engine would hopefully find something useful, and leave me a penny via AdSense in return. So far so good.
A couple of weeks ago I signed a contract with Newstex to include the feed from this blog in their partner's products, including EBSCO. You may recall I wrote about this arrangement in March. It's a non-exclusive contract, and I honestly expect I won't earn more than a couple of dollars per year. Really. Why bother? 'Cause maybe I'm wrong and it will actually prove lucrative. :-) I'm not the first Information Science blogger to sign up.
So back to the two requests for advertising. I think I'm gonna accept, but wanted to lay out some terms, AND to run them by you, my readers. I'm going to put a link on the right, under the About Me header, that includes information about advertising. I'm going to set it arbitrarily at $40 US per month per ad that appears on a specific post. For an ad that appears on every page the cost will be $200 US per month. Each ad will be clearly labeled as an advertisement; I won't advertise a product as a post. I will retain complete editorial control. I suspect these folks won't go for it, but at least I will have had a chance to present advertising terms I was comfortable with rather than accept whatever was offered...
What do y'all think of this? Would you still trust what I wrote if I accepted ads? Am I missing anything obvious? Thanks for the feedback!