If you are a regular reader of this blog (and I highly doubt it!), you will notice that I have made a few changes recently. I have split a couple of the blog topics into their own blogs, because I was starting to get a little more serious about them and this blog isn’t for anything serious. Actually, my understanding of search engine optimization has led me to conclude that a website that is about too many things is not going to be rewarded by the SEO gods. So although this blog will continue to be filled with miscellany, a couple of the topics that I write about are broad enough that I thought they deserved their own blogs.

This blog will remain a catch-all for whatever happens to be going on at the time, as well as a test bed for various experiments, such as the one that is going on with Google Ad Sense. The advertisements that you see on this site are all dynamically inserted by Google. I can control, in general terms, the density of the advertising, but I don’t have much control over where the ads go (not with the auto-placement algorithm I opted into to save myself the trouble of having to define specific ad spaces). And I certainly don’t have control over what the ads actually are. I mean, I was allowed to filter out adult content and a few objectionable topics, but by and large there’s still a whole lot of crap being shown here.

Click-bait headlines? Sure.

“One weird…?” You have to have some of those, or people won’t know it’s the world-wide web.

Buttons saying things like “download” that look like they’re part of the site but aren’t? Yep, got those, too. 

No porn, but porn-adjacent stuff. I guess that stuff sells.

Oh, and t-shirts with political slogans that could not be further from my own political viewpoints. Yeah, I’ll take your $0.03-per-click, ya jerks.

The Google Ad Sense algorithm tries to determine what your site (or, at least, what a specific page) is about and tailor the ads for that page/site. And it does seem to work from time to time. On the few truly popular pages of the site (such as this one) the ads tend to be about fitness or cycling gear as often as not. Most of the time, though, it’s real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, like what you see when you visit cnn.com or other sites that can’t be choosy about their advertisers. All told, the site brings in about enough to pay for the electricity to run it.

Ad-supported media, folks. I’m not sure how we got here, but it ain’t pretty.