Ads ads ads

I'm just about done thinking about advertisements for a long time. The drama began yesterday when I noticed that one of my ad providers seemed to be missing thousands of impressions from CB. Seeing as how that's the only income I have right now, naturally you can understand why I was concerned. It wasn't until this afternoon that I finally got some resolution, after framing the issue in a way that made sense. One of their tech guys finally owned up to the problem instead of blowing me off.

The whole situation puts me in a tough spot, because as a relatively small publisher for them, I'm certainly not going to be a priority. But compared to the remnant ad crap I get from everyone else, they go a long way toward paying my bills. It was 36 hours of frustration I really didn't need. I think everything is going to be cool now though.

Meanwhile, I got tired of the crappy weight loss ads on PB with the fat and skinny chicks that just aren't the same person. Those don't pay well, as you might imagine, and they're one step away from "male enhancement" ads. In any case, I never did get around to getting Google Ad Manager in play for PB, so I did that last night, hoping it could do better.

The thing that I learned from using it on CB is that it creates a no-risk opportunity to use Google AdSense. You set the "virtual" CPM's for your ad networks, and they show AdSesne only if they can beat that rate. That's much better than the wasteful "always on" method of showing AdSense that never amounts to anything. The preliminary results are encouraging, but as their algorithms smooth out over time and audience behavior, we'll see how it goes.