This is a great question recently asked by one of our students/clients when we said our usual introductory comments that “No we won’t spam you”, and “No we don’t use the click model on our sites”. Now most of you know, we are a small family business, and have been since day one, and I want to remain that way if possible.
Let’s talk spam. We have never spammed our students/customers and we have an anti-spam policy. You are automatically signed up for our Newsletters that we hope you do not consider spam, and which, of course, you can opt out of.
When it comes to the click model, there actually is a little story behind this.
When we first opened our Web site there were large additional costs to operating the site, it was not like today where you can lease a bay server for $10 a month in a huge Data Center. So we deployed the click model – basically allowing Google to automagically put advertisements on our web pages – and if my users clicked on it, there was a possibility of us receiving some revenue from Google. The ads are supposed to be in context of our web site, so we thought this might actually be good for our users and us.
We chose Google and used Googles services. We ran Google’s ad’s on our site. The usual income was not good – less than $100/mo., certainly not enough to get rich from, but enough to help offset the web hosting costs. Everything was fine for about a year, and then about 6 years ago we received this rude email (without any warning or interaction, I might add) from Google that stopped our AdWords account, and we were instructed to contact Google for more information. The link in that email went to a general information page that did nothing to explain why our service had been halted. After a call to Google, we were advised that they saw too many accesses to the ads from our very own IP address, which I remember saying: “That would be natural, right? So why not remove our IP address from the ‘count’?” I said this knowing that many of us here had actually clicked on Ads we were interested in. In fact, several times I personally bought something that was advertised on my own web site!
The response was both cold and without any further discussion. “No. Your account is suspended.”
“Wow”, I thought at the time. I wondered how many small businesses Google has “locked out” when it could be spreading itself deeper into the Web?
Naturally I removed all of the Google Ads from my sites. And, we have never been back, nor do we intend to. Ironically, we constantly receive Google Adword emails asking that we install the service!
It was almost with pleasure that I installed the Google Chrome adblocker to my web browser several years later.
All that said, I truly wonder how big Google would really be if they tried just a little harder with small businesses like ours.
Today, we have a great relationship with Amazon. Broadband Technicians need hardware and software tools, reference books, books on IPv6, or networking books in general, and much more. People need hardware like Wi-Fi interfaces that go into Monitor Mode. If you buy stuff from these pages using our affiliate link, we get a small cut without affecting your price. Again, nothing to get rich from but it goes a long way to offset costs of running the web sites.
If you really want to help us, check out the Buy Us a Coffee button!!! I really appreciate this.
Anyway, that is the story behind it. Thanks for the great question!