Some of you might have noticed contextual ad links appearing in some home page content and the Free Speech Forum recently. We are testing this form of advertising as another source of revenue for Imminst. These are the ads that occur within the body of the text in webpages, typically with a double underline. If you mouse over the word, an ad pops up.
Technical implementation is easy and site performance does not seem to suffer.
In limited use so far, there have been no complaints and the clicks have resulted in a few dollars.
I think the pros outweigh the cons. This would be passive revenue for Imminst - the best kind. We get money for Imminst projects/operations without having to lift a finger. Some people think these ads are annoying but the theory behind contextual ads is sound - hooking people up with the products they are interested in.
We would not put these in the most popular forums or those with exclusive banner ads.
The cons are that some people think they are annoying and some people might object to their postings being monetized (a little more directly than through Google Ads)
