psmith, journalist

I’ve always been a fan of “the practice what you preach” maxim. After writing about it, speaking to its creator and watching its gradual but promising growth, I’ve signed up this site to the advertising platform Addiply.

Those red boxes on the sidebar are available for text ads at £0.50 a week; a banner ad (see below) is also available for £0.50 a week. It’s not much, but it’s something.

I don’t expect or intend to get rich through this site or through online ads in general. But hosting isn’t free. And if there’s a way to help advertisers get their message across, I’m happy to help.

Addiply founder Rick Waghorn – whom I first wrote about my then colleague Martin Stabe wrote about exactly three years ago when he left the Norwich Evening News to concentrate on digital publishing – took me to task last week for hosting Google Ads which do nothing for either my meagre revenue or for the community I write about/for.

Ads for cars in Rochdale don’t say much about what I do, he rightly says. The £6 I’ve earned so far from AdSense would suggest it’s never going to be a significant earner. With any luck, to prove the point, this panel should show up something equally irrelevant:

[ad#Google Adsense]

And though Addiply has been more closely associated with the “hyperlocal” movement of blogs and sites that cover tightly defined geographies that are increasingly ignored by anemic local papers – check out the Lichfield Blog‘s healthy looking inventory – there’s no reason it can’t work on niche, industry-specific sites either.

As I look to advise clients on what ad platforms to use and why, I can now report to them that Addiply is fast, simple and transparent. But as Rick is fond of saying, you have to sell the space to really make it work…. so if you’d like to advertise to a growing band of 2,000(ish) readers a month, take a look at what’s on offer.