Google advertising (Adsense). Why do we carry it?

Well... duh!

That said, it's not exactly a major revenue stream for Travel Lists. It pays for the odd pint down the pub.

Despite that, we don't exactly go out of our way to improve advertising revenue. We could try advertising from other sources (Yahoo, Valueclick, direct sales, etc). We could put it on more pages. A quarter of the site's pages are menu pages, free from advertising (yes, I know about Google's 'terms of use' but like many publishers seem to, we could ignore the TOS altogether, or add a couple of words to dress the pages up as content).

No. The reason there is no advertising on menu pages (or on the home page) is that it slows things up. Every ad is another call to another remote server, and these are navigation pages. You should be able to whizz through them at the speed of light. That's why we dropped all graphics from the site design in the first place. That's why we don't have a logo. Just a favicon.


Anyway, the real reason why I started this blog...I was just thinking that, being an independent directory, our commitment/relationship with the advertising on the site IS slightly odd.

For one thing, we are in competition with ourselves. The better we do our job - list all the travel companies worth bothering with - the less likely it is that a visitor will click on any adverts.

On the other hand (and this is a benefit) if we are not doing our job properly (it happens! occasionally!) an advert might appear on a page for a worthwhile company that we haven't got listed, and that can be a handy tip-off!

All in all, you can tell, it wouldn't take very much to tip me in favour of ditching all advertising from the site, but for the time being I think I'll leave it and keep onside with the landlord at my local.