Adsense this, Adsense that

My brief experimentation with Google Adsense is now over. There are some residuals in the archives but that is because I can't be bothered to republish (I might one day) but on front pages and new posts it is gone. For good. ;)

This post might seem a little too coincidental to the current uproar in the 'Malaysian blogosphere' over commercial intent of blogs. (ed: Nice timing eh Jon)

While I am pretty much neutral in that sense (over commercial blogs) sometimes Google Adsense adverts in a couple of blogs do annoy me (not that it matters I know because I am clever enough not to accidentally click on em). No, I am not against other bloggers having Adsense, but sometimes it is really annoying to read a post with ads placed before a post, middle of the post, after a post, before the comments and sometimes after the comments. Of course

But the whole debate is amusing. Go laugh your socks off here.

I really love Annie Mole's blog. She owns one of the most popular blogs in London and it is about her daily trip on the Tube. The blog has ads but they are all tucked nicely in the side bars out of the way.

However... the real reason I got rid of Adsense (a few days ago) was due to my inability to filter out unwanted ads. Simple as that. When the London bombings happened and I started blogging about it (since I am a Londoner) Adsense picked up keywords such as 'London', 'Tony Blair' and 'terrorists' and started swamping my blog with pro-war adverts and a amusing website 'thanking Tony Blair from the USA'. There were also ads by Christian and Muslim groups. Look I do not care about your chalartan cults!

It was frustrating.

Naturally I flirted with Amazon UK associate program. This is a much better ad program because of the ability to choose what is shown. But my application did not go through due to the amount of 'bad language'. Maybe my English needs improvement, but I still did not know that Amazon UK operates on a 'Walmart' kind of policy.

Oh well.

As promised NeoCounter is gone after the initial 14 day trial. I got the visitor data I wanted. Here is the top 10 list of where visitors came out of around 1500 visitors since July 12th. Not many I know but at least I now know what to write about. With only 32% of visitors coming from Malaysia I think I should stop writing about Malaysia's 'issues'. Glad actually - there are just too many issues in that country. July 12-July 26:

Malaysia: 493
United Kingdom: 389
United States: 279
Singapore: 65
Australia: 43
Canada: 32
France: 21
Germany: 14
Greece: 13
New Zealand: 11

I was quite surprised by the large number of visitors from the UK though. Probably due to Europhobia's plug. Cheers Nosemonkey! And also making into a Tim Worstall Brit Blog roundup.

Update: It's been 1 1/2 year, I think I will be giving Adsense another go. If the results are still rubbish I will remove them.