In my latest attempt to make blogging pay well enough to afford new camera equipment, I’ve started displaying Chitika search-targeted advertising. The cool thing about this is that all of you who read my blog regularly won’t be seeing any additional ads because of it.
When somebody out there clicks on a link to Windypundit in the result set from a search engine like Google, their browser sends the URL of the search page in the Referer header line of the HTTP request. The Chitika system parses each Referer URL and, if it’s from a search engine rather than a link from a fellow blogger, extracts the search terms and uses them to select a banner ad.
On the other hand, those of you who visit my page from your browser favorites or feed reader won’t have to see the ads. Neither will people who get here via a blogroll link or a link from a web post.
According to Chitika, studies have shown that regular visitors to a site are annoyed by intrusive ads and are far less likely to click on them than people who stumble across the site in a search engine. So limiting the ads this way should allow me to use much more blatant and intrusive ads to snare search visitors without degrading the experience of my beloved regular readers.
It will be cool if it works.
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