google ads

I've been thinking about taking down the google ad up there. I read on some blog that having google ads is a sure sign of a blog that doesn't get many readers and that you should wait until you have traffic to put ads up. Whatever. I did have a pipe dream when I started this blog that maybe somehow I could find a way to just blog and not go back to work in January. But that was before I read any blogs and discovered that there a lot of really good blogs out there and that my pipe dream is really just a pipe dream.

But now I don't think I'm going to get rid of the ad. I've realized that, really, it's advertising just for me. When I wrote about kettles and our bad luck (or Dave's idiocy, depending on how you read it), the ad was for "Just Kettles." When I rant about native plants, native plant nurseries get advertised. These are things I'm interested in. It makes me laugh when I write about our decision not to sleep train Ezra and someone's sleep training method gets advertised up there, and when I write about a scary spider in our yard an ad comes up to "Kill Spiders." I'm starting to think God doesn't live in the radio; clearly, God lives in google ads.

The ad has even made me a few cents -- but that was when I clicked on the ad for South African property and it set off two weeks of obsessing how we could buy property in South Africa (we can't); I even chose the cutest fixer-upper in the colourful Bo Kaap neighbourhood of Cape Town. But we already have one unfixed-up fixer-upper and we live in it. The last thing we need is another one on the other side of the world.

There have been many ads that I've wanted to click on but I worry google will have me up for fraud. Is it really fraud if I'm genuinely interested in the ads?

I've just discovered some of the Canadian mommy bloggers and there's been some controversy about advertising and its effect on blogs, and popularity, and readership and stuff like that. But I think I'm missing a big chunk of the discussion and I haven't found whatever started it all off. I think it's fine to have ads. The only way that ad influences me is that it tells me when I may be going on just a bit too long about something, especially things like kettles and spiders.

P.S. When I went to my archive to get the spider link, the ad was "Armpit rash yeast?" Armpit rash yeast?!? I'm racking my brain trying to figure out when I wrote about armpit rash yeast or even when I had it but I haven't done either of those. Oh. It must be the wasp sting thing. Ok, maybe I will take the ad down. That's just nasty.