At the end of an article titled Buzzing your church on sydneyanglicans.net, Andrew Lim suggests making some money off your church site by adding Google Adsense. You can see his implementation on the Asian Bible Church site.
Now, I’ve made a few dollars through Google Adsense, and have a couple of ideas as to how to easily create two sites that will generate revenue. But, I will never be putting contextual ads on a Church or ministry site that I have control over – why not? Because you don’t have enough control over which ads will appear on your site… more than that, Google will serve ads that appear related to your site (based on keywords like “Bible”), but that doesn’t mean that the advertiser has the same belief set as your church or ministry. (would I put paid/unpaid ads for products/services which were in-tune with out mission… maybe)
You have some control over the ads Google will serve, using their competitor filter, however you cannot know which ads other people are seeing. The ads that appear when you do a Google search for bible are just some of what you might see if we served ads on the TAC site. Some of them are leading to sources that hold a different belief and/or are simply nutters.
Further, by providing ads, you are encouraging people to click-away from your site (and not even to something all that good). And from a visual/usability point of view, a big junk of the homepage of the Asian Bible Church’s site is taken up by an ad!
Back to the problem of using Google ads on a church site, I made Andrew some money by clicking on a few ads on the Asian Bible Church site. One lead to a site where you enter your star sign, birth year, hair and eye colour to be SMSed your “perfect lover”… now is that the way a Church should be encouraging people to seek out a relationship? – the answer is no, please refer to Matters of the heart for details (a nice bit of cross-promotion to round out a rant bagging out the use of advertising…).
one word: Adblock