The thing is, my modest web endeavors, which I do nothing to promote except on the strength of the content I provide, generates nearly 50,000 page hits per month from 7,000 unique visitors. With some retooling of some things I've done in LiveJournal communities (photocomm stuff like shoetree, abandoned buildings, etc.) that linked to my personal journal, instead going to a public blog with advertising, I could probably increase that another 10,000-20,000 hits per month. If the blog page took on a life of it's own as a result, who knows?Given my general anti-commercial stance, this is a hard thing for me to consider from an ethical stand-point. It's not that I view it as being a sell-out; I think I provide content which is genuinely appealing to a minute portion of the internet population at-large, why not get paid? For me it's a question of, is the income stream going to be worth the headache of re-tooling all of my websites? And more importantly, will it be enough that I can live with having advertising on my pages?
If any of you have experience with Adsense and the revenue it can provide, I'd be interested in your opinion. Actually, I'd be interested in any opinion at all regardless. At the moment, I'm of the mind to re-tool one of the sites and see what proportion of revenue-to-hits there is before deciding to expand it or take it down. I figure it's always something I can reverse if I don't feel it's worth the effort or compromise.
For the record, the three current websites are Beastie Boys Lyrics Annotated (outdated as it is, it still gets 400 hits per day and a new album is expected from them this year which means SURGE), Good Morning, Captain (also horribly outdated but still gets good traffic from fans), and my photo gallery, plus the retooling of soopageek.com to be a public blog instead of a portal to my LiveJournal.
