Adding Ads on WordPress

In late December I added Ads to my site. I have thought about just having them around long enough to make $100 (my subscription is $90 but it doesn’t pay until you reach $100)… I could then stop them and start them again next January.

Please let me know if they are obnoxious and I will tone them down. At the rate that they are going…I’ll have it by 4-5 months. $90 a year is not a big deal, but it’s the principle of it… it would be nice to let the site pay for itself.

I don’t want it to be a chore to read what I have…that defeats the whole purpose. Making a profit or any money has never been the motivating idea behind this site…or I would be homeless! I do it for the love of the music, movies, books, tv shows, and pop culture in general.

The reason I don’t do the free subscription of WordPress is that I like some of the features the Premium edition offers. I wanted to have more space to store pictures and other things.

Please tell me if they are in the way and I will stop some of them from running…and if they still get too much in the way…I’ll just stop them altogether. If you have time check it out and give me some feedback if you can.

Thank You

Max

Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

64 thoughts on “Adding Ads on WordPress”

    1. Thanks Jim. I just don’t want them to be annoying. I’m the same way…I read people’s sites that have them with no problem… it’s more of an experiment to see how it goes.

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    1. Are you in the reader or on the site? They don’t show up in reader at all. To see them you have to go to powerpop.blog
      No yours are fine… I have mine wide open though… I just wanted to make sure they weren’t popping up too much. I might cut mine down to just a sidebar.

      I just checked yours again… yea it’s just on the sidebar… that is probably what I’m going to do with mine.

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      1. Max, I went to your actual blog not the reader. Didn’t see anything. You’re the first person to report that mine are in the sidebar. One person saw them in the middle of my content! So strange!

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      2. I pull mine up in a different browser
        and they are everywhere… that is odd. Well like you I just wanted to be honest with people. I hardly noticed yours at all!

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  3. I’ve never noticed that you had ads Max. They must be very effective! I rarely read things in the Reader. I like the full slap-bang experience – like now. I just went looking for an ad on this posting and found one – but I don’t have a clue what it’s trying to sell! It says “Babbel sponsored. Learn more”. My highly intelligent brain filters things like that out!

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    1. Oh cool…well if you can’t hardly notice them with your highly intelligent brain…I’m ok! I probably will only run them until it hits a hundred and then pause…. and start them off next year again.

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  4. I mainly read your site in the Reader so ads aren’t an issue. I’d like to start running ads sometime this year and turn the site into a side hustle. I changed to a self-hosted blog because the ad rates on WordPress.com aren’t very good.

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    1. I thought most people did read through the reader but apparently they don’t….I also go through the reader.
      I looked at Google Ad Sense but it wants a plugin….to install a plugin you must have the buisness edition and I’m not getting that…although…I have read where you can insert some CSS code and do the trick.

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      1. I think it’s tricky in our niche, but another way of doing it would be to approach an online record store or something, and offer to run a static ad for them for $100/year. Then your site would be paid for and the advertising wouldn’t slow down your site.

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      2. That is a great idea. I wouldn’t mind that at all. So far I’m averaging .90 cents a day which would take me roughly 4 months but that is a ton of ads.
        I get around 600-800 visitors a day because of my archives….that would be fair for them.

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      4. Yes it would…everybody wins in that scenario…I’m not a salesman but I’ll draft an email…and see who I could send it to…and get all of my numbers together. Thanks

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    1. The way it’s going…within 4 months I can…I’ll turn them off then until January…
      Everyone who views in reader doesn’t see them. Reader is what I use mostly.

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      1. Same here, I just use reader for my content, but my blog gets up to a 100 views a day from Google mostly. I did the ‘Donate’ thing, momentarily ( I still have one link there), but I have been too lazy to take it off haha.

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  7. I’m fine with it since I do it myself. It helps pay for the annual fee and that is perfectly acceptable. Every site we visit has ads and some are obnoxious that have the pop up ads, but these are pretty harmless.

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    1. Thanks John. They don’t seem to be too bad…I usually use the reader but now I”ve been visiting people’s sites… sites like ESPN are much worse in annoying ads.

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  8. Your upper right corner ads are pretty unobtrusive, Max. What annoys me are blog sites with ads obscuring a third or half the page, or completely covering a post, forcing the reader to close them in order to continue reading.

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      2. Well yea…that blocks them….I read peoples blogs in readers…it’s easier that way for me

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      4. It makes it much easier…I thought more people would be in reader but that is not the case at least with the replies I got…which is cool…that explains that one of my most popular pages is my index of songs….you can’t see that in reader…well not the link to go there.

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      11. Do you have all of them running or just one on the side? I have all of them blasting…but they are not pop ups so they are not in the way…yours is always on the right side when I check.

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      12. I only have one running and I chose at the bottom of the page, after the content. Why you are seeing at on the right side is a mystery. I think we talked about it changing depending on the browser. I use firefox.

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      13. Right now you have one a little way down below your Circle Game video…not bad at all. It mixes in with everything. None of the ads are bad at all from what I’ve seen. If you go to a site like ESPN it’s crazy bad….

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  10. I’ve actually been thinking about enabling ads on mine, now that I’m finally getting decent numbers every day. Interesting to hear your experiences.

    I always read your posts on reader, so never see them. I just looked at your blog and there was one ad. They’re not pop-ups, so people shouldn’t get too annoyed by them.

    If you didn’t use ad-sense, what did you use? (If you don’t mind me asking?)

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    1. Oh I don’t mind you asking. I just use the Word Press ads. They were easy to turn on… Thanks for telling me… you can control where they are going…I just turned everything on.

      Google Ad Sense would probably be a little better money but I took the lazy way out lol.

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  11. I’m a little late to the party here, but a very interesting blog. I’ve thought about doing that too, but figured it would probably not generate more than the cost of the premium site so I haven’t bothered. Anyway, I didn’t notice any change since December on yours. Now, most of the time I look at your posts here, when I’m on wordpress (usually after putting my own ones up) and I don’t see ads. Sometimes I’ll look when not signed in, usually on the phone. I did that yesterday and there were periodic ads as I scrolled through yours, but that is normal, it seems to me. I see that on several other people’s blogs, and I don’t mind them particularly (now if they were pop up ads, that I might find annoying.) Anyway, when I looked your ads were all for HBO , which ws fine, usually when I see ads on these blogs though they relate to things I’ve searched for and they appear all over any number of sites. Do you get the sponsors yourself or choose them from a list?
    Anyway, I wouldn’t worry at all about it and keep on, hopefully you make your expenses back at very least.

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    1. I’m averaging 90 cents a day….with that I would have the cost back in 4 months and then could just turn them off…so far I got a positive response to it.

      They don’t pay a lot BUT…Google Ad Sense does pay more and anyone can do that. I signed up for it but didn’t follow through yet because I certanly don’t want both.

      With Google sense you do have more of control on what goes on there…with this one you don’t….but you do promise to keep your blog famiy friendly and with the exception of a damn or hell…mine I think is.

      I read yours in Reader also…I hardly ever go to peoples sites. The only reason I get the traffic I do is because of the index I put up. The index on “All Songs between A-Z” is one of my most popular posts….from there people click on a song they like and that is where I get my traffic.

      When I posted that index…my traffic rose at least 40 percent.

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      1. I’ve thought about putting in an index, but it seems like a prohibitive amount of work to link every old post … do you need to update it daily or does it somehow self-update?

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      2. If you ever want to do it tell me… One index you can have makes itself…you see that one on the side of my page? I could make it add to itself…but not the A-Z index I have them listed in…I have to do it manually. I do it every 2 weeks or so…
        It would help your traffic big time…most of my views are on the old stuff every day. It does take some time to get it going but once it is established you have it.

        You just have to break down the catagories.

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      4. I can show you…I’ve shown a couple of people. It’s a page not a post. It’s a pain to make but once you make it…you can update it every few weeks like I do. It really kicked my traffic way up.

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      6. It’s not a problem…first thing you do is setup an archive page…that will list every post you ever did. It will help you get everything in order.
        You can see mine at http://www.powerpop.blog/archive

        I’m going to dig out an email where helped Keith set an archive up. No one really knows aobut it unless you direct them there…it’s for your benefit…it’s all of your posts in one place with a link.

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      7. I just checked your archive out and see you have it broken down by movies, album reviews, songs, TZ, etc in a-z order that is exactly what I want to do! Question: if nobody really knows about it how are so many people able to find it and search it?

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      8. Oh….I wanted you to start out with the archive…because it gives you the link and everything so you won’t have to look up all of the links like I did! LOL… make the archive page first. Then from there we will start making each category in Pages.

        The hard part will be making the categories because they take forever. When you get them made I’ll show you how to make the menu so people can see them. The menu just points to them….I’m sending an email

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  12. I read your posts by clicking onto your blog, not by the reader, and haven’t seen any ads.

    Sadly, even after 6 1/2 years and having over 1,000 followers, my blog doesn’t generate enough traffic to qualify for ads. Many of my reviews of relatively unknown indie artists don’t get very many views, nor do most of my Weekly Top 30 posts.

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    1. I didn’t think I did either but I’m generating between 70 to 90 cents a day….which is fine with me as long as it pays for my subscription.

      You might be surprised Jeff….I also go through reader…I think most of my traffic is my older posts. I get around 600 views a day…mostly off the older posts.

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      1. I’ve tried signing up for ads, only to be told I don’t have enough traffic. I’m only averaging 200-300 views a day, which isn’t enough to qualify, apparently. My blog just isn’t as popular as yours and others who write mostly about older classic artists and bands. Even though more than a thousand other bloggers follow my blog, only about 40 ever read or like my posts. I guess what I write about just doesn’t interest them.

        I thought of adding a donation plugin to my blog, but that would likely encourage artists & bands who wanted reviews to make a donation in the expectation I’d review their music, and I do not want to be a ‘pay for play’ kind of blogger.

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      2. Yes I have a lot of followers but like you…not many of them still read the site. I think I get most of my views through google search…people searching for songs.

        If I don’t stick to well known classic rock my views take a dip…The Twilight Zone has dropped my views but I love doing them.

        I can see what you are saying about the donation. One thing Graham mentioned…is to find some site related to what you do and see if they would pay say $100 or whatever for a year static ad. I might try that and drop WP ads.

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