Has everyone noticed that “advertisements” have appeared in the blog’s sidebar? I added them in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep because my rhinitis flared up~
Of course, putting up ads was also something I had long had in mind. Why put up ads? First of all, of course, ads can make money. Right now, to keep this blog running, with hosting fees and domain fees, I spend about 300 yuan a year. Although I don’t really care about money, after all I’m only spending my parents’ money, so if I can make up a little of it, that’s always good. But judging from this blog’s current traffic, using the usual click-through rate (five per thousand), in a month at most I’d probably only earn about 3 yuan, one-tenth of the expenditure. Purely in terms of profit, whether or not I put up ads doesn’t make much difference.
So putting up ads is mainly symbolic. This clearly means a shift in my attitude toward advertising, from resistance to indifference, and finally to recognition and acceptance.
In the past, when I read Postman’s critique of television culture, “the logic of advertising” was basically the worst part of modernity. Irrational, incendiary, profit above all, eyeball-centered… serious political debate, under the logic of advertising, also degenerates into mere posturing. But thinking about it now, on the one hand, media have multiple possibilities, and television advertising may not be without positive dimensions; on the other hand, the problems Postman criticized were mainly problems of television, not of advertising itself. Chongqing Satellite TV without ads could still be terrible, and advertisements in internet media may have different characteristics.
One of the most important positive meanings of advertising is that it supports the freedom of media. After all, any media operation needs funding. But who is to provide the money? The first model is to charge the audience, which is the profit model of older media such as books, newspapers, and films; television can also partly rely on this model, for example with some paid channels, but this monopolistic model is not very suitable for the internet. The second is the sponsorship model: the sponsor may be an individual or a specific institution (such as Chongqing Satellite TV), or it may seek sponsorship from the unspecified public (such as Wikipedia). The former makes it difficult to maintain media independence, while the latter is unstable; and if one needs to establish a fund for long-term management, certain supervisory and operational mechanisms are still required. Although the donation model is actually very suitable for individuals and small organizations, in China’s current environment it is rather difficult to carry out effectively and have people accept it. The third is the advertising model: helping others run their ads does not necessarily affect one’s own independence, and it can also bring relatively stable income. Although it is not suitable for a niche academic blog like mine, and my hosting costs are relatively higher too (of course this also has to do with China’s internet environment), other small site owners may still be able to profit from it; at the very least, it is not difficult to maintain balance between income and expenditure and ensure the sustainable development of a website.
Of course, the dissemination of advertising itself is also part of freedom of speech. So-called freedom of speech must allow the existence of advocacy and promotion. Eliminating advertisements through top-down, uniform management does not bring about any pure content; what it brings is turning the entire media into a monotonous “advertisement” (sorry, I’ve thought of Chongqing Satellite TV again). If there is no compulsory control and speech is open, then one must be prepared to welcome advertisements.
In addition, advertising is also a kind of room, a gap. When we focus on content, advertising provides the necessary breathing space, so that you do not become completely submerged in content—in this sense, including television advertising, advertising has a kind of “distracting” function. Generally speaking, we do not think “distraction” is a good thing. In particular, the internet age has produced a condition in which attention shifts every few minutes, which people regard as an incomparably bad trend—but on the other hand, the highly immersive tendency of video games is also criticized. Too much immersion and too much distraction are both bad, but moderate distraction is not only not a bad thing, it is absolutely necessary. Including doing scholarship, single-minded concentration is not always a good thing; some texts, read with too much investment, can instead lead you astray. A better attitude is to try to “dialogue” with philosophers, and dialogue is not always immersive: “turning one’s words aside and talking about something else” is the norm in everyday conversation. The most natural conversations often happen while doing something else, for example while eating, drinking tea, watching a play, attending a gathering, taking a walk, and so on.
Internet advertising is very different from television advertising. Television ads aim to attract the eye, whereas internet ads need to trigger a “click.” A good television commercial will instill a sensory “impression” in the audience; “Hengyuanxiang sheep sheep sheep” is an extreme case, but all advertisements are, to a greater or lesser extent, a kind of brainwashing. Internet advertising, however, is not seeking impressions; especially advertising after Adsense, which generally settles accounts based on the actual number of clicks rather than the number of impressions. In other words, internet advertising pursues clicks, not merely display. A large part of Google ads are text ads; they do not rely on eye-catching sensory stimulation to attract attention, but succeed through content relevance. I also tried an ad widget from Amazon China’s 卓越亚马逊, which can automatically display relevant book links based on the page content. Ads in this form not only do not feel abrupt, but instead enrich the website quite nicely (since Amazon’s crawler does not seem to have begun exploring my website yet, this tool is temporarily not working; let’s see later).
In any case, I’m willing to give it a try: on the one hand to see how much I can actually earn, and on the other hand to see how effective the ad placement is~ Actually, it’s quite amusing to see what sort of keyword ads appear on my own page. For example, the very first thing I saw after putting the ads up was an ad for matchmaking for single women over 25 _-_-|||
If you don’t want to see ads, it’s simple: register and log in, and they won’t be shown~
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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