Is Advertising on a Personal Finance Blog Bad?
Jan 24th, 2008 by Carlos
When I first started this site, it was hosted by WordPress and I didn’t have the option to put ads on it. And to be honest, I never really thought about it. I started the blog thinking I would help others go through the financial awakening that I went through, and I hoped to learn more and more about personal finance, investing, writing, and blogging.
Now, as you can plainly see, I have ads on my site. I’m not making a ton of money just yet—I just broke through the dollar mark this week. But a lot of bloggers are making some serious dough. Not quit-your-day-job type money but really-nice-side-income type money. Hundreds, and sometimes thousands of dollars a month.
But there is somewhat of a controversy out there about whether or not ads should go on sites purportedly out there to “help” others. “How do ads help others?” they demand.
Let’s get two things straight before I go any further:
- Running a blog like this one takes up a lot of time. It’s the equivalent of a part-time job. Other bloggers are more prolific and dedicate even more of their time to it.
- One of the basic tenets that personal-finance bloggers repeat over and over is the idea of diversifying your income.
So do the math.
It makes absolute sense for bloggers to put ads on their site and try to make some money off all the work they’re doing, don’t you think?
I think so. Before I put ads on my site and taught myself all about how they work and the best ways of incorporating them, I couldn’t of told you which blogs I read had ads in them and which ones didn’t. As is the case with most proficient web users, we are blind to ads.
The thing is, most other people aren’t. They see a link that says something like what they want and they click on it. They have no idea they’re going away from the page they were on. Is that wrong? Is it deceitful? No, it’s advertising, and people do it in the real world all the time.
It’s not like they are being scammed or spammed or having their identity stolen. All that’s happening is that people who are reading about savings accounts are (unknowingly?) clicking on an ad for ING Direct.
That is advertising, not cheating. Deal with it.
I’m always weary of sites that don’t have advertising. It’s extremely easy to put ads on any site of significant traffic, so either the site isn’t read by people (a bad sign) or the owner doesn’t like money (a bad sign for personal finance site).
I have clicked on ads before – and probably will do so again in the future – sometimes something comes up that is of interest to me.
I don’t see it as unethical, like Lazy if it’s a personal finance blog and it doesn’t have ads, unless they’re really new or on wordpress.com, you have to wonder whether they actually know about personal finance.
On the other hand, if it’s a blog about, say, politics then they are quite difficult to make money from – I’m happy for them to have ads, but I can see that people might not think that it’s worth the effort.
That’s depend. If you advertise something that you wouldn’t use yourself, then it’s probably pushing the line.
That’s a great point Lazy and it’s something I was hinting at. If you espouse the importance of alternative income, shouldn’t you follow your own advice?
[...] but this is a case where I use and actively espouse the benefits of ING. So I have absolutely no qualms putting it at the top of every [...]