Over on twitter there has been several posts by a few of you regarding the new advertising box that appears under a post. Advertising appears on most websites and is often the only method of covering costs. People rarely pay for news or reviews or most things. Even apps and games now feature advertising and often don’t even offer an upgrade to remove the ads.

So lets recap. It appears most of you see this single block of advertising as shown below.

Last night it changed to this for me and it does constantly change. It is different again this morning on my mac.

But I’ve seen the following. This is more in keeping as to what I expected and what WordPress promoted as high quality adverts.

And as another example, I have seen this. Again, much better.

Just for comparison this is a recent advert on allaboutwindowsphone.com. As you can see they also feature some aspects of advertising that don’t fit as well. The difference being is there is more text and less free spaces making it less obvious. There is also more advertising on the site, so it probably hides it well

So why the advertising? Well simply to earn money to cover the costs of running Gavin’s Gadgets and then hopefully at some point in the future years ahead to allow me to earn enough money to pay for basics like food, gas and electric. WordPress offer a basic free package which includes adverts inserted by WordPress. These adverts are awful. If you pay WordPress an annual fee of $30 they remove the adverts. I have paid this on top of any other costs for the last 2 years. During the last 2 years I have provided daily updates and reviewed over 30 phones and over 50 accessories.

To move the website forward, I purchased 2 domains and now run the website on gavinsgadgets.com. This costs money to run etc..and the single advert is meant to “hopefully” cover that cost. Not sure it will though.

Before adding any adverts I looked carefully at the options and I chose WordAds as they promoted it as a high quality offering. You can read all about it here http://wordads.co/benefits/ and you will see the type of adverts are somewhat different to those that have appeared in real life. I felt WordAds were a better choice than Google’s offering.

My own views on the adverts. Well actually it is just a single advert, so in terms of volume I really don’t understand the fuss. I really don’t. I could have had adverts running down the left and right side of the page as many other websites do. I could have had annoying pop up adverts (that drive even me crazy). In fact most websites have more adverts than here and by some volume. I referenced allaboutwindowsphone.com which I know several of you visit. This also has a block of 4 ads just like mine. What I do think and agree with is because there is so little advertising and previously there was none, this advert block of 4 stands out a bit.

And another reason why I don’t get the fuss if you go directly to gavinsgadgets.com and read the posts you only see the single box advert once. You can read the next 14 posts without seeing it again. So come on guys is it really that much of an issue!

So can I change the position of the advert. No. I have no say in this whatsoever or the content, which is meant to be high quality content too. I have even tried inserting more spaces after a post to create a bigger gap before the advert, but WordPress seems to remove them 😦 Can I stop the advertising. No, as I have to cover my costs. If I remove WordAds, WordPress will then fill the blog with their own advertising.

So what are the other options to covering my costs. In reality I cannot see any. I have setup an Amazon Affiliates link, just go to the About and Donations page to use the special link. If you buy your Amazon purchases this way, this will again help towards the running costs. But it won’t cover them.

WordPress have stated that the adverts will improve over time and that I have not given it anywhere near enough time to adapt.

So like I said, I need to cover the costs of running the site. I don’t think that is unfair or unreasonable. I did try and pick a high quality advertising option. So that is the situation. If you have any ideas on how to generate more revenue without the ads then get in touch. Or would like to help support Gavin’s Gadgets then head over to the About and Donations page. Or if you would like to become a sponsor get in touch too.