Date-based WP theme

Marc was telling me before that most of the people he was giving free advise about AdSense placements aren’t too glad about the recommended layout or ad positioning for their blogs.

This is practically true with most established bloggers who are starting to contemplate about seriously monetizing their blogs. Likewise, popular or high-traffic blogs always get feedback from their readers about the ad being intrusive to their blogging experience. Everyone who has had good experience with ad placements know that you get higher click-thru rates if you place them above the fold — just below the title and above the content. Honestly, I don’t like it that way as well because it gives an impression that I value the monetization part more than the blog itself. This argument has been heavily discussed before as “blogging for people vs. blogging for search engines”.

I suggested several methods to resolve this issue. First, educate your regular visitors to use RSS readers and give them full rss feeds. That way, all they get is your full content without the ads (except of course if you have ads for rss). The drawback here si that most bloggers do not want to provide full rss feeds for fear that they be targetted by splogs and it could reduce their pageviews/traffic.

Another idea I had in mind, and this has been employed by other sites, is to allow readers to login to your blog and introduce them to an ad-free layout/theme. Thus, everytime they visit your blog and they are logged in, they will be see the intrusive ads while the accidental visitors are served the usual ad-optimized theme.

The last one is to create a WP plugin which detects the age of a blog post and automatically re-alligns the ad placement if a post if older than a pre-determined set of time, say 1 week or one month. Since your regular visitors are only reading the most recent entries, they will be served with an ad-free (or ad-minimized) layout. The older ones in the archives however are optimized for accidental visitors. Here’s a proof of concept using time-sensitive css format.