layout: post title: "John Batelle: Searchblog's New Look, Ad Update" created: 1094533049 categories:

• Search Engine Voodoo
• Personal Publishing
• BMC

Thanks to all who helped me grok this move, and supported it. And please, send feedback on the new look, and whether the ads are bumming you out, to the comments belowJohn Battelle's Searchblog: Searchblog's New Look, Ad Update

John Batelle has a) changed the look and feel of his Searchblog and b) is experimenting with online advertising (he's starting with Google's AdSense). I'm mentioning it here because this is one of the few times I've "clicked through" on his RSS feed item and actually gone to his site -- he has full posts in his RSS feed, so I have very little incentive to actually go to his site, unless I want to leave a comment. And longer comments are usually easier to keep track of on your own site.

Looking at the site, I honestly can't remember what the previous design was -- again, because I read an (essentially) text-only version in my RSS reader.

I run Google's AdSense on my site here. It certainly did start off as an experiment, but because I have very high search engine rankings (and thus lots of search traffic), I actually make (some) money from it. But virtually all the clicks are (I suspect) from visitors that come here following search links. In essence, I run those ads to make money off people who aren't my regular readership. In fact, I could actually pepper my site with ads for "anonymous" users -- this would have no effect on regular readers (who sign up for an account) or those that read through an RSS reader (and my hits are about 2-to-1 in favour of RSS).

Speaking of regular readers, Feedburner is giving me some idea of how many "people" are subscribed to my site. Looks to be about 72 over the last "7 day period". That actually doesn't cover some other feeds, like my one for Voice over IP, which I can see from my statistics gets a lot of traffic.