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Site news: New ads and MyNokiaBlog Mobile Site

| October 30, 2011 | 69 Replies
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Hey folks. You may have noticed adverts suddenly popping up in more places.

This is because on the day of Nokia World, something happened to our adsense page where they just stopped displaying and hence the revenue was in pennies per day. We’ve kinda been needing this to pay the hosting.

We asked on facebook and twitter and apparently they can’t even see the ads at all, only a limited number of locations being able to see the ads. I don’t know what google is doing, but well, now that means we’re looking for other sources of revenue.

Speaking with other bloggers, they’ve also recommended that I optimize more for ads. I learnt that with our traffic, we could actually make some decent amount of revenue, and not what we were getting with Adsense (that was before it crashed). I’m not looking into making money for me, no.

If we do make some revenue I want to plough that back into MyNokiaBlog:

Regular writers.

  • Recruit writers who can be aptly compensated for their time and effort. These guys won’t just be anyone filling in space. From the current team and new (if any are interested) we will make sure these guys are knowledgable Nokia fans.
  • I want the site to be less reliant on my time table. As a med student, I know I have quite some work to do, especially around exam times. I don’t really want either to be compromised. It has helped a lot certainly to teach me time management (such as getting all work done in advance so I can blog), but then there are definite other times that I want you guys to get the Nokia stories and but I may be out of action (hospital placements, exams, in lectures, in practicals etc).
  • We already have a base of writers have have been instrumental along with our readers to help MyNokiaBlog grow. I think if the ads work, I can make sure they get something in return as well as getting others who would be willing to throw in more time as it becomes feasible to (I mean, work for free, but miss out on when you could be working or get paid to blog for something you like).
  • We cannot take paid writers right now. We will issue a request to come join some time in the future when I know we are able to fund both current and future writers. As it is, they’re all currently just doing this for the fun of it. 🙂
Improved site
  • Improve hosting. Touch wood things have been OK but just in case.
  • Site Manager – someone to look after behind the scenes? Also possibly improve layout, colour schemes, design of the site?
  • Other suggestions?
Now it’s early days yet. Thanks for those who gave suggestions on alternatives to adsense. I know a lot will have particular reservation for infolinks as I originally turned that off in 24 hours as I found it to be intrusive (also I’m not sure it actually works. Hmm, we’ll see). We are waiting on an email from the rep who kindly noticed we had turned it off to offer optimisation.
The new set of ads for now are temporary, something to help at cover at the least the hosting for the site. I will be looking into getting direct advertising or sponsors possibly (or however else some other bloggers I’ve spoken to that they’ve managed to get a frightening amount of revenue, well in the eyes of a student anyway). They do have quite a lot of ads, I think 50% of the pages are ads, that’s not really something I’d want to go into though.

Mobile MyNokiaBlog

One of the early implementations we used to bring mobile version didn’t go too well. It either did not bother to bring a mobile version or it conflicted with caching plugin meaning it crashed and prevented the site from loading for everyone.
Conversing with some bloggers, I found a new solution. I think, fingers crossed, it would be ok this time as we have also had help optimising the cache. I mean, N8 can actually load it now.
Another push for this is that I don’t want my readers who are already on mobile browsers to be even more lumbered with ads! Although it might be counterintuitive to cut off ad-revenue from mobile readers, the last thing I want to do is make reading the site an added pain due to more ads loading.
The frustration of loading up ads on a mobile browser (especially the Symbian one as that also tries to pull in the flash objects). So for you guys, you have the option to directly view the mobile version or later switch to the full version. It’s up to you. I think on both versions you will be able to leave comments as before.
Feedback time:
We always welcome any and all feedback. In this particular occasion we’d like to know:
  • Does the mobile site work? What handset and browser are you using?
  • How are the load times? (on full and mobile?)
  • Do you see adverts at all or just empty blocks? (If the new non-adsense ads aren’t showing up either then I think it might be another problem with the site which adding more ads isn’t gonna help)
If ads are generally too intrusive, I would openly suggest to use ad-blocks. They make the whole web appear clean. However, you may come across an advert that may be genuinely useful to you and symbiotically, these things do eventually help us out (Some offers I found to be really inviting, event sent them over to a couple of friends who now are on N8s).
However, don’t click on them for the fun of it or at all. I think there’s something in the clause for not giving incentives to click. Yeah, don’t do that. Being the more web-savvy person, you’re probably already aware of such things.
Anyway, cheers all.
Update: Thanks all for the feedback. I just wanted to add, that if you find the mobile version hard to navigate, there is the mynokiablog app that Alan made from Ovi App Wizard. For Symbian devices only I think.
There’s also Opera Mini for lite mobile viewing. (BTW, apologies for no spaces in between paragraphs. WordPress does this sometimes and I don’t know why/how)
Update 2: 07/11/11
We are still currently in the process of assessing our ad-networks.



We are currently testing out what type of ads can help fund the site.

We appreciate the support of our readers and thank you all for the feedback. You may have noticed that all of the infolinks have been removed. These are the blue link words as well as the rectangle banner.
As much as I want to produce revenue to keep the site up, I'd prefer our readers to be happy with how they visit mynokiablog.com 

I also want to thank those who are notifying us of other pop up ads. We specifically set our ad networks not to provide things like this (or video ads/full page ads) but they decided to bypass us anyway. That was sorted quite early on though.

As for other adverts on the side, that is also being  sorted. I am also planning to turn off some other ad networks (especially the annoying you are the 10,000 visitor! banner) if I cannot find a way to curb them from the flashy, distracting appearance.

Many Thanks,

Jay
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Category: Nokia

About the Author ()

Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and  Facebook.com/mynokiablog. Check out the tips, guides and rules for commenting >>click<< Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.com
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