To Advertise or Not to Advertise?

This post was originally written in my old and now defunct blog on January 22, 2008. Original post is italicized.

When I made Manga Tutorials, I absolutely, positively was bent on not having any advertisements on the site. And so it was until a year or so ago. Before I get into why I reversed my long-held belief, I’ll explain why I didn’t want any advertisements in the first place.

During the 90’s, with the internet exploding, many dot com start-ups coming into the scene and the money being poured into the world wide web, one thing stood out the most: advertisements were everywhere! Pop-ups, pop-unders, skyscrapers, flash ads, and so on and so forth. At that time, pre-Manga Tutorials and Eclipse Unleashed, my tutorial site was called Forever Dramata and was hosted in tripod, a free web hosting site. Being free, tripod got funds from advertisements and there was a lot on my site. Let’s just say that I grew an aversion to ads.

Fast forward to the early 2000’s. I sign up with a web host provider and oh the joy… I don’t have to have ads in my site! Years went by and I was very happy with my ad-free drawing site.

Around the mid-2000’s, I had a change of heart. My site became very popular and more and more people were coming to Manga Tutorials. I had a forum, an Oekaki Board, tons of tutorials and pages and hence my bandwidth use skyrocketed. With more bandwidth use came more monthly fees and with the jump, it seemed more prudent to have the site generate income. Enough to at least cover the monthly hosting fees. With that in mind (along with some other real life issues), I set up advertisements via Google Adsense at the site. I still prefered an ad-free site and in keeping with that I kept the ads to the top pages only (i.e. index, books, oekaki, faqs, about, etc).

I plan on expanding the ads to all the other pages to generate extra income and put more back into the website using those funds but for now, don’t dismiss ads in your own site like I did. It can really help you out when your site is growing.

Update: Early March 2008, I redid the website to php. With this change, I was able to code things with as little effort as possible and this helped me expand the amount of pages ads were to be placed. The website now has ads in all the pages but mainly on the side and bottom and none on the top. Even with this change, I am now earning much more (say double to triple) than before and with this extra income, I hope to do regular contests for all those who visit Manga Tutorials as a sort of “Thank You” for coming to my site. Stick around the site for news about the contest. Let’s just say that it’s something pretty cool and I did tutorials on it… n_n