Licensing and Advertising

For a while now, I've had a few Google AdSense ads on my site, as an
experiment. I think the program is a great idea, and it's easy to use
and in general fairly unobtrusive. The ads that get selected are
frequently comically mismatched to the content due to homonyms or the
like, though. In any case, I figured if I could generate some revenue off of
this website, that'd be a nice fringe benefit.

When it comes down to it, it's not very much money. If it worked out
to, say, $100/year, that might feel like it's worth it. It's not very
much money, but I could buy a few games with it and it would be a nice
perk. In reality, it's not even that much, and for such a small
amount, I'd get more satisfaction from providing the content here
unsullied by the clutter of advertising (even as unobtrusive as Google
AdSense is). So, unless something changes, I'll probably continue the
experiment til the end of the year and then remove all the ads.

On a related note, I've officially put the Creative Commons license
for this blog on the web page. I used the "Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License". In the majority of cases, if
you want to commercially use any of my content (text, images, source
code) that is not explicitly otherwise licensed, I am happy to grant a
royalty-free license for such, but I do require that I be contacted
first.

In the end, I don't put stuff here in the hopes of making a buck, I do
it because I think it makes the web a better place and it gives me an
outlet for the occasional self-indulgent rambling. I really enjoy
hearing stories from people about how their 12-year-old loves the
Heroscape Combat Simulator, or that my discussion of Baby Signs
convinced their spouse to give it a try. So, let me know if you
like/appreciate/use the stuff I put here.

Update (12/9): Several people commented that part of the issue
is that there are no ads in the RSS. This is true, but I'm not
convinced it would make a big difference anyway, for two reasons: 1) A
lot of evidence suggests "regulars" of sites don't click on ads. If
you've subscribed to the RSS feed, you're a "regular". 2) I get a lot
of random visitor traffic, mostly through google, and this is a far
greater number of visitors than the "regulars". I estimate somewhere
around 100 regular RSS-based readers of this blog. In contrast, the
web version of the blog and the Heroscape related stuff I've built in
particular (which have AdSense on them) have somewhere in the ballpark
of 1000 unique new visitors per week, excluding search engines, other
robots, etc.

I may actually try to break down the ad revenue page-by-page and leave
them on some pages if one or two pages represent the bulk of the
revenue, I may leave it. Further, I may leave the highest revenue
pages in place long enough to get over the threshold at which they'll
send me a check. In any case, I find ads in RSS much more annoying
than most ads, so I don't foresee myself ever putting those in this
blog/feed.

On additional note for those who read via RSS: If you're interested in
reading the comments on current "front page" entries in RSS as well as
the entries themselves, there is an RSS feed that includes them at
http://mkgray.com:8000/blog/index.crss. Enjoy.