Recentlog
davidw wrote, after noting the poor click-through-rate for his LangPop article's Google ads: Not that I'm really complaining, I did langpop.com for fun, but it's a good reminder that it's a lot better to produce and sell things to a more general audience. Programmers expect, and largely get, most everything for free - me included..

I think it does illustrate that it is not so easy to sell to hackers, but not that trying to is not worthwhile. I read the LP story on RSS, so am the sort of reader who only occasionally sees such ads. After the above post, I looked at davidw's site and was served the following ads:

1. Gratis Website Optimizer
   Testen Sie, welche Zielseite die meisten Conversions erzielt. Hier!
   www.Google.com/WebsiteOptimizer

   Interesting for me, but know the product, thought I knew what the English version of that page contains.

2. C Language Community
   Share knowledge and solve problems with other IT pros.
   C.ITtoolbox.com

   Sounds crap.

3. SPARK Pro
   High Assurance by Design Software development environment
   www.adacore.com/spark_pro

   Interesting for me, again know the product, and thought I knew what that page contains.

I clicked through each, just to see if I was right about the advertised content. And I was.

This is consistent with the alternative hypothesis that hackers tend to find out about things they are interested in before marketing guys put together their advertising campaigns. I'm guessing there may be a niche for a text-ads service catering to hackers marketing their content to other hackers.

Postscript zanee responds, agreeing with what I said, and suggesting that Advogato's trust metric could form the basis for such an ad network:

I think the idea of having a network specifically for developers is appealing. There are a lot of things that I hear about when people are working on them or receive links from the people actually working on the device or software. By the time I see the ad I have either purchased, implemented or wrote it off for whatever reasons. The idea reminds me of the text-ads specifically targetted to the users of Kuro5hin.org; ad’s by the community for the community. It would be exciting to see if we could set this up on Advogato; as a bonus we could test the idea and network and maybe see if it’s feasible for other developer sites.

The ad’s would be ad’s directly from certified users of Advogato; this way we can weed out the rift-raft and a system of thumbs up/thumbs down which is prevalent on Facebook would bump ads up and down the chain.