Tailoring Site to Irrelevant Adsense Ads

Long-time lurker, first time poster and all of that...

Here's the scoop, I "inherited" a little site that draws decent traffic w/o much effort but is tough, tough, tough to monetize. Basically, it seems to attract a the kind of crowd who "don't use none of dem der credit cards, ya'll."

It's bad enough that Adsense will only run the dreaded "Get a Blog Here," "Wonderful Place to Blog," "Express Teenaged Angst Here," "Blog, Blog, Blog," etc. stuff. You know, the Dreaded Adsense You Don't Want.

So, I figure the traffic is good enough that if I could convert even a small % at a few cents/click it would more than pay for its costs and would actually be a cute little residual money maker, as it requires virtually no upkeep efforts.

Thus, I decided to run Adsense big and bad in a square above the fold while running the skyscraper down the left side (two separate skyscrapers, actually, with some recip links in the middle). Right above skyscraper 1 and below skyscraper 2, I added some encouragement.

Basically, I said "Hey, you can start your own cool site about Subject X, just find a free blog host and you'll be up and running in minutes." Only, of course, I said it more eloquently and replaced the variable with the actual site subject matter.

So, I have converted my Subject X site into a "Free blogs kick ass for fans of Subject X" site. And, lo and behold, it is working. CTR is surprising, to say the least.

Here's the deal, is this all cool with Adsense TOS, etc? I mean, I am not really soliciting clicks, but I am pointing out how cool it would be to find a wonderful free blog host...which, not coincidentally, is likely to be advertised within a twitch of my observation.

At what point are you just being crafty enough to monetize the otherwise worthless vs. when you are illegitimately pimping for clicks.

Opinion?

 

You've got to be very careful here. I would at the very least provide some links to the generic hosting services for blogs (blogger.com, and others that everybody obviously already knows about) underneath these paragraphs so that you're providing a useful service to your visitors. Since most people have heard of the generic services, you'll probably still convert. If it's coincidental that there are ads for blog hosts on the page, that's probably O.K. since advertisers are obviously targeting those people looking for blog host services. If you're bringing them qualified leads, it's a good thing.

Ian