Some interesting data from Starcom MediaVest seems to indicate that the majority of clicks being purchased by the known world are being consumed by unemployed, Twenty-something, gambling, shop-a-holic, Internet addicts.

Hmmm, this tends to explain why those overpriced Google AdWord campaigns you are running don’t seem to be performing very well despite the mountains of cash you’re dishing out.

The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

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I got the following question recently from Arlina (sorry it took me so long to answer…):

There are so many “make money online” ads…can you recommend some? I have a blog and I’m using Adsense, but I’m not making any money on it (it’s really new, so not much traffic). There is so much info out there, it’s overwhelming!

Yes Arlina, you’re right. There is a lot of information out there, most of which is very misleading, and it’s hard to know what are reasonable expectations for advertising revenue as well as where to turn to for actual advertising dollars. So, I’ll try to answer your question by at least pointing you in the direction of some of the biggest Google Adsense alternatives out there. And hopefully this is one time when our fairly large and vocal reader community will chime in and share their cumulative knowledge as well.
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You guys know by now that I enjoy a good commercial. Well, my friend Karen S. sent me this one and it’s great. I don’t want to give a lot away before you give it a look, but the ingredients for this ad are:

• A totally hot Swedish chick
• A bathroom stall
• Cocaine
• … and a bowl full of disappointment

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He, he, he. Hmmm. I like chocolate. I like partys. I guess I just never realized how much I like it when you put them both together!

You know, over in Japan they don’t even try to hide the sexual overtones in their advertising. They just put it out there for everyone to gawk at! That’s right, it’s hanging there, bouncing around, for the whole world to see!
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You know, I don’t think I could be any more disappointed in Google than I am today.

And that is a shame because I’m normally a big fan. I mean, just look… I’ve got an entire category dedicated to Google Tools with 50 posts in it! But the problem is, today Google decided to penalize a whole boatload of sites for some reason or another, and in the process they dropped OMB from a PR7 to PR5. And just in the last few weeks it had already moved from a PR8 to PR7.

I just don’t understand this at all. I know Matt Cutts, and have spoken with him and we’ve e-mailed one another several times on the topic of Google PageRank, and even I just have no idea why in the hell this happened.
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You know, I’ve had it completely with BlogRush. As far as I’m concerned John Reese can go get bent. Why? Well, this is a service that was so poorly rolled out that after I announced it right here on OMB I had to modify my post within 1 day. That is the ONLY time I’ve had to do that in over 850 posts.

Well, a few days ago John Reese sends this e-mail out to the world explaining that he knows there were some serious problems with the initial launch and that they are making a bunch of changes to clean up the site, and so on, and so forth.

So, like a sucker I thought I’d give them one more chance to redeem themselves and put the widget back in the sidebar. Within a very short period of time I was already noticing that there were porn links appearing in my sidebar, so I removed the widget.

Now, flash forward to today - when I don’t even have the widget on my site- and I get the following notice telling me that my content “did not pass our Quality Review criteria”. HA!
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All of my regular readers need to be giving thanks to Donncha Almighty for creating the new Friends Don’t Let Friends See Adverts plugin!

Donncha told me how he was selectively filtering ads so that he didn’t show them to his regular readers, and I was so intrigued I kept asking him how to do it. Well, he went one step further and wrote a plugin to make it all that much simpler for PHP hacks like me!

So, if you aren’t seeing ads today it’s all Donncha’s doing. And he’s a regular reader here so feel free to thank him in the comments!
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Have you ever wondered how to show Google ads on your WordPress blog’s home page, but only after the very first article? Well, here is how you do it. And don’t worry, it’s quite simple, and you can’t permanently damage anything by giving it a try. ANYONE can do this!

1. In the PRESENTATION menu, under THEMES EDITOR, find the theme file called “Main Index Template” (index.php).
2. FIRST: Copy and paste everything you see here into a blank text file and save it. This way if you screw something up you can revert back to the original without hurting anything.
3. Find a line of code that looks much like the following: <?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
4. Immediately after that, paste the following: <?php if ($count == 0) : ?> ENTER YOUR AD CODE HERE <?php endif; $count++; ?>
5. Save the document and refresh your page. You should see the ad ONLY after the first article on the homepage.

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I come across so many good articles online, but simply don’t have the time to share them all as regular posts. So I’m trying an experiment here.

I’m going to post a few links at the end of the week to other interesting articles. I may make it a fairly regular thing, but the jury is out at the moment. Feel free to give me feedback as to whether you’d like me to continue, or not bother.

• Dark Passage: Pirates of the Strait of Malacca
• This is Where We Live: A look at America by the numbers.
• Papers, Please! Arrested at Circuit City
• Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks
• Iowa court rules same-sex couples can marry
• Ambient: Clean the beach
• State Senator Ernie Chambers Sues God

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EDIT: I removed the widget referenced below because after a few people installed it (including me of course) it turns out that the links which were appearing were to sites that did not even have the widget installed.

Additionally, the links were often extremely low quality since there was no quality control involved other than self-selection into the program. Bottom line: this service will take away more value than it will add. Sorry about the false start… it sounded great to begin with.

Some of you may have noticed that I just added a new widget to my sidebar. It’s called the Blog Rush widget, and it is a free article promotion service. Every time the page loads a few articles from similar blogs are shown in the widget. And for every time the widget is displayed on your blog, your latest articles will appear on another blog’s widget!
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Hold on, hold on. Before everyone goes and gets all upset with me, this is not a jab at Christianity. It’s actually an illusion that features Jesus!

You might need to stare at the lines for a few minutes, but after a little while you’ll begin to see the outline of a figure. I found it helpful to actually step away from the monitor to really see the image pop out.
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Jeremy Wright of b5media covered the topic of Blog Monetization during the WordCamp 2007 Conference in San Francisco on July 21, 2007.

Jeremy has experimented with dozens of types of monetization and ads and shared some of his experience with the WordCamp community regarding what works and what doesn’t.
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