As you, dear reader, may have noticed, my blog has a decent number of advertisements on it. This is mainly due to my unquestionable faith in the free market and the belief that 'free' content on the Internet is never really free - someone is paying for the time to generate the content, the serving bandwidth and the consumer is paying for their connection. As a result of these ideas, I thought I would try embedding advertising in my blog to at least benefit from a portion of this. Plus it's fun.
The Google services (Blogger, Adsense and Google Analytics) all play together very nicely. For this reason, and my love of all things Google, I have integrated the three into my blog. Finally Adsense has come to fruition!
Figure 1 - My First Advertising Check!
As is obvious from the check, I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon to focus on my writing career. It's still fun to think about. Even more amazing is that Google is able to host my blog, my pictures (through Picasa) and provide all of the tools for their share of the advertising revenue. Even more amazing, is that most of these tools would still be free even if I did not advertise with Google - because they would like to analyze the data I am generating. As a software engineer and IT professional, without a doubt, these would be much more expensive, and not as good, if I were to maintain a server and use existing (or custom) software to provide these services.
Thanks Google! You've made my life more fun, and a little bit better.
Figure 2 - Me Holding My Check with Crazy Eyes
