I’ve known Jon Husband for less than a year now.  I don’t always grok what he’s says—the man has a lot of grey matter under his grey hair.  But he and I have been talking about blogs and ads and contextual ads specifically a lot.  So Jon has writes a great piece for our Qumana blog on, essentially, that blogs are going to be fertile ground for ads, and well targeted, meaningful ads.  Doc Searls, I think, missed Jon’s point a tad.  Jon wasn’t say that it’s inevitable that all blogs will have ads, what is inevitable is that blogs that want to have ads, will start getting better ones.

In the Jimmy Breslin school, as Doc puts it, Google AdSense is just not working for me.  I’m not going to disclose how much (or little) I’m getting.  My biggest problem is that because Google sets the ads from the titles tags it seems, I can’t get anything other than ads for blogs (and related) on my site.  This just isn’t effective.  I’m seeing the same boring ads over and over again.  Nothing new, nothing interesting.

Mitch Ratcliffe, who has also been talking with Jon, gets what Jon is saying.  I certainly hope that a) my blog will start getting more and more traffic so advertisers will come to me and b) it really starts helping to pay the bills in a significant way.  I think that the way to achieve a and b is through better ads and context.  Traffic begets traffic, so I think good ads could also me that I could advertise on blogs related to mine and get more traffic.  Maybe at a reasonable price too.  We’ll just have to see.

http://blog.qumana.com/blog/_archives/2005/2/10/314884.html

http://doc.weblogs.com/2005/02/11#theExperienceOfNoAdvertising

http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2005/02/qumana_blog_the.html

http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2005/02/doc_on_jon_husb.html