I’ve been trying to find a reliable metric to track traffic ever since the site was launched, but many methods are inconsistent or rely on not-for-profit systems with frequent outages. There are a number of complicated solutions available, as well as one that is very, very easy; Google Adsense.
If I placed paying ads on this site, it would be very easy for a court to misconstrue my efforts to educate the public for a crusade for personal gain. I haven’t put any ads on the site to avoid exactly that discussion, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take advantage of Google’s ads for the sake of tracking my traffic, even if I’ve made it impossible to actually get paid for doing so.
The ads that have been put on the site are at the bottom of pages, contain extremely limited text, if any (because they were specifically counter-optimized to be unlikely to produce relevant results) and were installed with an incorrect tracking ID.
That previous paragraph may sound like gobble-de-gook, but what it means is that A) ads are out of the way, B) unlikely to be of interest to anyone, and C) lack the necessary scripting to actually pay me on them, no matter how much money the generate.
So that means I get to track traffic through the ads without actually getting paid on them, even if they go gang-busters.
That’s why the ads are there, it’s so they can show me my site traffic with relevant and comprehensive details as I need them.
If you have any questions or concerns about them, please contact me and I’ll be happy to address them directly.
Tags: ads, advertisements, banners, google, Legality, links, update