You may have noticed that there are no advertisements on Harris Online. There are several reasons.
One is that I did have ads here many years ago. In the earliest days of this site, Google had a service called AdSense, which would embed commercial messages relevant to the content on the site. Then I’d get paid a very tiny amount for each click those ads generated. This never amounted to much, but the bigger problem was that the ads were often for companies I would never have accepted if I had a choice.
For instance, I wrote often about the evils of self-proclaimed psychics and similar scam artists who made unverified claims of paranormal abilities and then ripped off anyone foolish enough to fall for their nonsense. But Google AdSense didn’t understand my editorial stance. Rather, its spiders and robots saw keywords appearing in the text on this site, then automatically generated ads for exactly the lowlife scumbags I railed against.
I tried everything I could to prevent those messages from appearing adjacent to my writing, but when it became clear there was nothing I could do about it, I simply removed the Google AdSense code from this site forever.
A more entrepreneurial person would have taken it upon themself to sell some banner ads here, but the idea is anathema to me. I’ve never been interested in going out and finding sponsors, including throughout my radio career. I’m not a salesman and never developed skills in that area.
I have friends whose income is supplemented by — or in some cases comes solely from — commercials they read live during their shows. I was always too busy preparing the actual content of my show to spend time also coming up with clever things to say about sponsors. There were several times when I did live reads of commercial copy given to me by an agency, but I just read them as is, sure that listeners could tell my disdain for doing so.
On the rare occasions when a salesperson from the radio station begged me to meet with a potential advertiser, I went along but made no effort to entice them to buy live spots during my show. I didn’t mind them buying commercial time, as long as I wasn’t the messenger. My job was to create a radio show great enough to attract a large listenership, which translated into higher rates for commercials. But, to me, they weren’t content. They were a break in which I could regroup, set up my next segment, and think of what I was going to say. In retrospect, I was actively undermining the salespeople’s efforts, which is why they quickly stopped asking me.
After I retired from radio altogether in 2018, a lot of people asked me if I was going to start doing a daily or weekly podcast. My answer was always no.
I explained that I had spent forty years getting paid for speaking into a microphone and had no interest in doing it as a hobby that provided no income. Since I wasn’t going to find sponsors who would write me a check, that was a non-starter. But for those who pestered me on this point, I always told them that if they wanted to sell commercial time on a podcast I hosted, I would launch one and split the proceeds with them. They never brought up the subject again.
So, if I’m not going to invest time and effort into selling ads on this platform, how about using one of the companies that would do it for me? The problem there is that in order to interest any such outfit in doing that, I’d have to give them some kind of metrics regarding how many people read the stuff I post here.
But I have no idea what those numbers are, and don’t care. Regardless of whether it’s twenty people or twenty thousand who read each piece I post, I merely use this platform as an outlet for whatever’s on my mind, not to generate what I’m sure would be a depressingly insufficient income stream.
One last thought. Years and years ago, I installed ad-blocking software on all of my devices. If don’t want to see them on other sites, why would I want them on mine?