Ad Blocks

In the ongoing struggle to figure out how to make ends meet, I decided to add a bid for placement game to my community web sites. The front page of the site tends to get the most traffic. On that page, I placed an "ad block" with three slots. People in the community can bid for those three slots. It will be interesting to see if any one does. Here a list of the sites in the program.

As you can see, I don't have a lot of traffic. At the moment, the adBlock is live on ten different pages (whoopie!). To average page views per day for these ten pages is just over 500. So, if the three ads paid $10 per 1000 page views. I would be collection ($10 * 3)/(500/1000) = $15 a day!!!! Not minimum wage, but in Bush's America that is a lot for an independently owned organization.

During the beta test, I set reserve at $10 to $12 per 1000 ad views. I will probably drop the reserves when I feel comfortable with the whole process.

I think the ad block idea is a good way to handle bid for placement on small sites. If people like the ad block program. I will open source the code for it.