An apology
September 29th, 2008
First, I need to apologise for the bad pun that graces today’s cartoon. Waddya mean, you don’t get it? Am I the only one with a thesaurus around here?
Second, you’ll notice we dropped the banner from the top of the page. Part of our drive to ultimately become an ad-free webcomic! As soon as this thing is self-sufficient you will enjoy pure 100% HITC without the fluff. Until then, we just have to suck up those AdWords.
Last, but very much not least (well, from our egos’ point of view anyway) we got a really nice mini-review from the Fleen Team (find the blog here at www.fleen.com) so thank you very much folks!
October 1st, 2008 at 12:26 pm
If you would like advertising that is more suitable for a webcomic site than adsense, you might want to take a look at ProjectWonderful.com.
You have full control over who advertises on your site, you can check each site and approve each ad before it runs, and a lot of web comics, blogs, and game sites advertise on it.
And it’s pay-per-day ads, so you will make money even if nobody clicks the ads.
I would try it out with a few button sized ads on the sidebar or a single 125 square, just to get your feet wet.
You also have the possibility of picking up some free advertising for this site, as well, since many sites that use it don’t have a minimum bid and you can get a few days with a bid of $0.00 if they have any empty slots.
The reason why the webcomics community has embraced their ads so much, is because it works well with sites that are more graphics based than text. Adsense needs text to be able to match the ads, and because of that it doesn’t work well with webcomics.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Thank you for the information. PW is on my list to look into, since I’ve seen it on quite a few webcomic sites during my ‘research’.
I have nothing against AdSense per se, but you’re right, it’s not very smart at providing ads of interest to our readers.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:07 am
Another thing about Adsense that makes it unsuitable for a webcomic is that webcomics generally have more of a loyal following than traffic from search engines.
Adsense performs best on sites that have most of their traffic coming from searches, and the ads blending in with the colors of the site.
This way it kind of tricks people unfamiliar with your site layout and they click the ads because they contain the keywords of what they are looking for and they are in too much of a rush to see if they are really site content links or ads.
But what would you expect from a search engine that has its own ad network other than to produce ads that appeal to people they send to you?
Loyal readers aren’t looking for something, are quite familiar with your site layout, and they become blind to Adsense rather quickly, mainly because they are unappealing to them. And this is the fact on any site, not just webcomics.