Ad-Play: Experiments to Better Understand Online Advertising

Some of my readers may have recently noticed the introduction of online advertising, being displayed at the top and bottom of all pages. Although some may not believe me, this is by no means a money making scheme. I have recently become intrigued by the online advertising and search engine optimization space. I want to try and better understand how search engines make decisions like page ranking, content trustworthiness, site indexing, and file parsing/usage. I hope to gain insight into these activities by leveraging heavy logging and analytics for this blog and my other sites. Over the next few months I hope to collect data related to several experiments with analytics services, ad services, and even testing the impact of factitious postings, malicious takeover, and even out of topic postings.

So in short, Yes, there are now adds on the site. No, I don’t make many really any money off of them. On a good day I may make a single penny. In fact, most of the experiments i’ve been conducting have caused quite a large decline in the pay per viewers (RPM/RPC). The advertising, analytics, and tracking are all just means to collect data to try and better understand the effects each of these experiments has on the overall operation of a standard website.

If you normally use adblock or other online advertising/tracking prevention mechanizes to stop those pesky ads or to maintain your privacy.  I formally request that you continue to due so, when interacting with this site, as its a valid aspect of this type of testing. However, please note that all requests sent to this site, and all data sent in response is being logged. There is no way to opt out of this type of logging. Although I would hate to lose reader because of these changes, I fully understand, and recommended checking social media for updates related to this logging being disabled.

Updates related to future experiments, supporting data, and findings will be posted in the future when time permits.

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