Buzzing your church

Date Stamp:: 16 March 2006
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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…).

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categories:: Church Web Sites

Comments

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one word: Adblock

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Comment by: Simon ·
Date Stamp: Thursday 16 March, 2006 at 02:31 AM

Pete, I’m not adverse to advertising… it’s the context that I’m talking about here.

For some sites which I enjoy/would like to see continue… I like to click on the ads, knowing that I’m supporting their blog/podcast etc.

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Comment by: Scott Yang ·
Date Stamp: Thursday 16 March, 2006 at 07:40 AM

I completely agree with you.

You can’t really specify what ad will be shown on your website (you can only filter out the ones you don’t want). Also I reckon having a 300×250 right under the article heading simply yells out “Click me! And get me out of here!”—not something a church webmaster would want. Moreover, I do not think “Christianity” (and I am talking about the biblical evangelical ones) is currently a “rewarding” AdSense keyword. I know there are quite a few religious/spirituality ones that pay well, but then these are the ones you don’t want to see on a church website.

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Comment by: Simon ·
Date Stamp: Friday 17 March, 2006 at 04:39 AM

Pete, no, but you can tell Adsense that some content is more important.

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Comment by: Peter ·
Date Stamp: Friday 17 March, 2006 at 07:25 AM

Sorry I meant by my comment that I don’t see much advertising these days because I’ve trained adblock.

I’d concurr with the desire to control content of the ads. Can you specify generic keywords or is it just the content of the page?

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Comment by: Simon ·
Date Stamp: Sunday 19 March, 2006 at 06:38 AM

Scott has written a much longer discussion about this article.

While we’re at it, it’s interesting to observe how the community forums work on the sydneyanglicans.net site, or don’t. I glance at the latest updates to the sydneyanglicans.net Community Forums occassionally – I tend to pay more attention, if the main page of the site has an article of particular interest to me. Thing is, rarely are the forums discussing the articles. For the “Buzzing Your Church” article, only three people have made comment. Just noticing the disconnect.

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Comment by: Phone ·
Date Stamp: Tuesday 21 March, 2006 at 07:04 AM

Looks like someone has listened to all the talk and removed all the google ads. The amazon ones remain, but they seem to be approriate for the website…

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Comment by: Neil ·
Date Stamp: Tuesday 21 March, 2006 at 09:28 AM

I sent a pretty strongly worded message on Sunday to the person to maintains the Cathedral pages about the inappropriate nature of most of the ads. Did that have the desired effect? Dunno, but as you can see, a bit more discussion has ensued.

But Simon, regarding the disconnect between the SA articles and the forum discussion. I think that is simply the whole ‘forum mentality’ playing out. Web forums tend to have two types of users: The large majority of registered members who lurk, or just drop in and out (like yourself), and the small minority of regular posters who really form the ‘community’ of the forum. The vast bulk of discussion is then driven by them and will tend to revolve around topics and issues of interest to them. Just human nature at work…