Over the years, mainly out of sheer curiosity, i've had fleeting thoughts of placing some advertising on this blog. Although I know not that many people read the crap I write here, I'm extremely curious to see how much real revenue through advertising that this site could actually pull in.

Advertising on websites these days is mainly based on a per-click basis, with the advertiser paying a certain amount to those displaying or publishing the adverts only each time someone actually clicks through to their site. Thus if nobody actually clicks on the ads, most of the time nobody gets paid.

Probably the easiest and most widely used way to set up ads is through the Google AdSense program. Google also offers referral rewards for sites who refer people through one of their ads to download particular applications. These include applications such as Firefox bundled with the Google toolbar, and Picasa (both of which I use and recommend).

The AdSense program does have a few conditions: there is no set disclosed rate for click-throughs, sites are not allowed in anyway to explicitly ask or encourage visitors to click on the ads, and sites are also not allowed to disclose their earnings from the program.

So you may see where this is going: over the next month of NaBloPomo I will trialling a few modestly located Google ads on this blog, plus adding a few application referrals to the links page. I don't intend for these ads to be permanent at all (as I don't expect it to make much/any money!), but rather just as a trial to satisfy my curiosity. It would be good if they could at least pay for the cost of the domain registration and/or hosting though...

Comments/feedback are of course welcome.