Sausages and Erectile Dysfunction
Oct 10, 2007 · 06:30 AM · permalink
James wrote us to say
I read bike hugger in a feed reader and I was disturbed to see a Jimmy Dean sandwich ad appear below a story on bike commuting in the rain. I went to the BH front page and there’s a big ol’ Viagra ad posted below the same story.
Besides being really tacky these ads aren’t apropos of cycling or in my opinion any healthy lifestyle.
Can you guys be more selective about who you let advertise on your site?
and I responded, “at Bike Hugger we’re friendly to all sorts of cyclists, including those that eat sausages or take erection pills.”
Joking aside, the ads are provided by our friends at FeedBurner and they use a sophisticated delivery system: if readers don’t click, the ads don’t show — if you refresh the page frequently you’ll also see that the ads only show a few times and are replaced by Google text ads. The ads are also geotargeted, so you may not see Wendy’s or Circuit City that are also running.
As we move forward with the business of Bike Hugger, described here, we’re working with advertisers on unique programs, podcasts, and more. To bring our readers more blogging, the ads pay our hosting and underwrite costs. If you’ve read us for a while, you’ll notice we’ve gone from periodic posting to daily, to multiple times a day.
Brought to you by
We also run an Amazon Store and Amazon Affiliate ads. The “Brought to you by” sidebar are the retail goods we’ve made and sold, including my book. Brought to you by includes ads for Elliott Bay, Schooner Exact, and other Seattle-area businesses.
One thing we don’t do is pop-ups or interstitial ads (click on ad before seeing content) or ones that float over the page because that totally annoys me.
If you’ve got questions/concerns about our ads let us know here in the comments or via our contact form. I’ve been doing this for a long time and been on both sides of the “web should be free” debate.
Sidenote: the lingerie line sold on Amazon with “hugger” in the product description cracks me up every-time I see it. The lingerie periodically shows up and sometimes is just a small scroll from the Viagra ad.
Why isn’t Viagra appropriate for a bike site? Why, Pfizer should throw in a free sample of Viagra with the sale of every non-ergonomic male saddle! And I’m not even going to touch the connotations of “sausage”…
With any automatic context advertising there’s always going to be some ads that won’t seem to fit. There’s a lot of personal blogs but for anything more than that it’s crazy not to be running advertising. Even if you love blogging it takes time and energy. Hosting costs money and if you want good design and don’t have the skills you have to pay someone. Advertising keeps content free and if you don’t like ads, don’t click on them.
At least the Jimmy Dean ad is for the “healthy” version. It has just the egg white and it’s canadian bacon instead of sausage or bacon. There’s a lot worse things to eat. Actually the nutritional values aren’t bad except I think one of them has over 40% of the sodium for the day. I eat them occasionally when I’m in a hurry. Just pop it in the microwave and then eat it on the way to work.
You can use Firefox with Adblock https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10 and you will never see any of the ads.
Ultrarob,
Hosting is most of it. Hosting is very commoditized and after lots of frustration we decided to go with Strangecode, a boutique hosting and it’s well worth it. Not cheap at all, but I was just done with companies like Dreamhost.
DL,
I use GoDaddy for hosting. It’s a reasonable price but the last couple weeks I’ve been noticing that the database access is very slow some of the time. Sometimes my pages load fast and sometimes they don’t. If I remove my product listings from pages then they’ll load fast.
The cycling and outdoor gear search part of my website has been getting more traffic. It’s all database driven so I may have to switch to hosting that gives me fast database queries. Go Daddy is plenty fast 95% of the time but the other 5% it is really slow. If I was a first time visitor during those times, I’d go somewhere else instead of waiting.
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