Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

The title says (or rather, asks) it all: does a blog without AdSense, or other forms of ads, make sense?

I was struck once when a blogger friend and colleague asked me once why I don’t have AdSense on my blog. My blog has been around for three years, two of them in its own domain, and it’s obvious that I might have been missing out on a lot of potential revenue and passive income.

Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a definitive answer.

It was, perhaps, just a coincidence — or a combination of a lot of things. Laziness would be the primary culprit — perhaps I was too lazy to sign up for AdSense and paste the code on the sidebar. It might not make sense considering the length of many of the posts that I write — but it makes sense considering the frequency of my postings. Maybe it’s because I could afford to not have ads — but a lot of bloggers with ads could afford that too.

Then there’s also the angle that I am uncomfortable with ads — I am uncomfortable at the thought that I would earn money off my knee-jerk opinions and my purely online, armchair research. Perhaps, it was part of my journalistic training in my college journalist days. Perhaps, part of me believes Jeff Atwood when he said that advertising damages credibility and professionalism. No offense to bloggers with ads on their personal blog, but just like Jeff, I feel that ads on my personal blog simply isn’t right.

Then there’s the knowledge that if ever I decide to put up ads, blogging will become a real commitment, and my current pace of posting might not be acceptable afterwards.

However, in the same entry, Jeff admits that not only are ads on a blog inevitable, but there are ways of putting them on your blog without being a sellout.

So there will be some changes in this blog, but not much. There will be advertising in my personal and tech blogs, but the ads won’t come from any third party network, they will purely come from our business, I-NAV Travel & Tours, which I obviously has a direct stake in anyway. There will be some third-party advertising on the I-NAV blog as well (I’m in the process of changing its template), and I have a pro-blog idea that might just not make sense if I don’t put up ads, but that one’s still in the works.

I guess the final answer would be that it just doesn’t make sense to not have ads — if you have your own business that you need to sell.