Do you click on blog ads?

I read a lot of blogs, especially blogs about writing, web geekery or feminism. At one end of the scale are ones like Kev Price’s SEO blog. It’s a one-man job with no ads, and the blog is clearly an interesting supplement to his day job, rather than being his actual job.

At the other end of the scale are blogs like Crafty Crafty or Shiny Shiny, two of about 40 blogs (not all of which have repetive names) owned by an umbrella publishing company. These are very obviously pretty successful pro blogs, as they employ a lot of full-time writers, and they’re jam-packed with adverts.

In the middle of the blog-ad spectrum are blogs like The Curvature. This is where I’m guessing most blogs are sat – owned and written by one person, and displaying a few ads and maybe a tips jar in the hope that they can earn enough revenue to blog all day and still pay the rent.

Click-to-thank

If I’ve read a good post, I click an ad. Is that wrong? I see it as a way to thank the writer. ‘You’ve worked to produce something I’ve enjoyed’ I think, ‘and while I’m too stingy to give you money for that pleasure, I will do something which costs me maybe 2 seconds of my time so that someone else give you money.’

I realise that in the long-term economic view of the web what I’m doing probably isn’t very helpful. When companies realise that yes they’re getting click-throughs, but no they’re not selling anything, they’ll probably stop advertising. Then my talented blog-writers will have to go back to growing potatoes or cleaning wheely bins, or whatever it is they used to do before they spent their days tapping cleverly at a keyboard.

But then again, if I don’t click at all I’m still not buying anything, and the big advertising company could still draw the same conclusion and pull out of the blog market. At least if I click I’m giving them a chance to drag me in to their shopping system with promises of pretty things.

I do realise that this is a vastly simplistic view of what is probably a hugely complicated issue, but in the absence of a more informed understanding of blog economics, I just want to know – do you ever click on blog ads? If so, why? If not, why not?

And in case you’re suspicious, no I’m not planning on installing ads on this blog. The pennies I’d make wouldn’t be worth having butt-ugly ads imposing everywhere.