Help wanted [LWN.net]

Help wanted

Posted Jul 18, 2009 4:00 UTC (Sat) by apollock (subscriber, #14629)
Parent article: Help wanted

Okay, so I work for Google, so I may just be a bit biased, but why go to all
of the trouble of trying to sell space, when you can just run AdSense on
your site?

Is being choosy about the advertisers really worth all the extra hassle of
trying to spin up your own sales force?

Is the typical LWN reader likely to click on ads anyway and not block them
completely?

What's your click-through rate like on your current ads?

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Adsense

Posted Jul 18, 2009 13:00 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

You may have noticed that we *do* run adsense on the site. There's two problems with it:

The money from Adsense is welcome, but it's far from enough to solve the problem. There appears to be no shortage of sites selling Linux-related space, so the rates are low.
Adsense gives almost zero control, and little idea of what's even appearing there. That got driven home when we started getting hate mail from California last November; it seems that Adsense decided to run pro-Proposition 8 ads on LWN for California readers. We still haven't really forgiven that one, it was a real abuse of trust as far as we're concerned.

We would love it if Adsense just made this problem go away, but that is not the way of it.