YIFY Sells Out

Hi Friends,

If you're a longtime supporter of Yourself in Five Years, you've probably noticed something different about the blog. If you look to your right, you'll see that we've sold out and added advertising to the blog. It's that stuff to the right. You know...probably something about teeth whitening or laser hair surgery or something else you probably aren't interested in. From now on, you'll see those Google ads when you log on to YIFY. I know, adding advertising to a blog probably isn't as shocking as Dylan going electric, or Metallica cutting their hair, or The Jonas Brothers doing...well...I don't really know what the Jonas Brothers do. I really need to brush up on my pop culture references. But anyway, I decided to give in to the Man and sell out. Here's what I was thinking:

It isn't (all) about the money. Really, it isn't. I'll let you in on a little secret. YIFY averages between 35 - 903 visits per day. Well, most days we're right around 35 visitors. If my friend Kath decides to give me a mid-post shout out, we get around 900 visitors. Yeah, so I guess you could say her blog is a little bit more popular than mine. Oh, did you see what I did right there? I put in a link back to Kath's blog...now we're getting fancy. Give me a couple years and I might start putting pictures on this thing. But who knows, I just heard that my cousins in Ohio are reading the blog, so I could be up to 40 visitors per day in no time. So I'm pretty sure that with 40 visitors per day, the ads probably aren't going to make me rich, especially since I know most of you, and you don't need teeth whitening or laser hair surgery.

The Ads are sort of funny. Google is usually pretty smart when it comes to these things. They're scanning content and trying to pick out commonly used words and phrases and trying to match the ads to the content of this blog. Yeah, good luck with that. Perhaps if I stayed true to the blog's initial value proposition (something about life five years after college) then maybe all of the ads would be about paying back student loans, or online gambling, or maybe even life insurance. But as you can tell, my thoughts haven't really had any consistent theme lately. My guess is that the Google Spyders scan the content of this blog, they probably make it through five lines of rambling text about bananas and just say 'screw it, let's just throw up the teeth whitening ads, I'm going on break.' So part of my rationale was that I wanted to see what kinds of ads they put on the blog. I saw one for Jimmy Johns last night. I don't think I've written anything about sandwiches or speedy delivery, but whatever.

It is sort of work related. I sort of work in online marketing, so it makes sense to have some first hand knowledge of online advertising. Oh, and if Google somehow looks at the complete lack of clicks on my ads and comes knocking on my door saying that I actually owe them money, then perhaps this could be considered a business expense. I'm not really sure if you can lose money doing this, but we'll find out. At last count I've had a total of 2 clicks on the links. One was my friend Ben. I told him to click on one of the links. I wanted to make sure that the clicks were being tracked. The other one was me. I just really thought Jimmy Johns sounded good.

So that's the story of the ads on the blog. Good story, huh? Oh, and I guess it's not okay to instruct y'all to click on the ads. Google says that's not okay. I don't know how they'd know, but they would. Maybe they'd come to your door instead of mine. I don't want to find out. But if you're interested in teeth whitening or laser hair surgery or anything else that the ads are promoting, feel free to click away. 

And if you scroll through the ads (I think there's a scroll arrow) and see a funny one, leave a comment and tell me what it was.  That's why I put them there, remember?