I’m not, but ongoing is now, having moved three timezones over from Vancouver to a comfy new Athlon 2200 with, they tell me, good connectivity. Matt carried off the transfer with only the slightest of hitches, we’ll see how it goes. Should make everything much cheaper, which was the point. Since we’re in metapublishing mode, read on for my latest browser-market-share numbers and some notes on Google AdSense trends.
The trend is obvious, right? Wrong. If you can see it, do fill me in.
AdSense · I turned on AdSense’s “channel” facility, making all my ads fall into two buckets: front-page and individual-article. Basically, all my revenue comes from individual articles, and you don’t have to be a genius to see why; my front page has had the same lame get-rich-quick-by-blogging ads for months. So I used the URL-exclusion thingie to suppress a couple of the most egregious and content-free; so far, that’s just cut the number of ads on the page from four to two. Is there nothing to fill in the vacancies? Am I being punished for refusing ads? Who knows.
In general, the AdSense performance has been pretty poor in 2004. It started with a bang in January then declined monotonically to a third of that early peak, the low point was in August but it’s creeping back up. My readership lagged a bit too, I think I was kind of boring there for a while after joining Sun, but it’s been picking back up too. But the ad revenue is weird, and I want to understand it better, because I want to understand this whole blogging thang and I’m cynical enough to think that understanding the money is essential to that.
