When everybody's favorite happy chappy, Ben Stein, criticised the dubious practices of Goldman Sachs, he stirred a hornet's nest on Wall St. Personally, I think his call against GS is BS - he should have criticised every financial institution except Goldman Sachs!

Double standards

Dead-pan Ben proposed the possibility that GS sold sub-prime securities and also bet massively on those same securities dropping equally massively in value. While every other financial company almost went tits up in the credit crunch debacle, Goldman made huge profits from this tactic.

Some would say fair play to Goldman for betting big and winning big, when their competitors on Wall St wimped out or failed to see the play. I am sure money managers think it is admirable business, but Ben Stein (and I) think it is unethical.

Ethics never got in the way of Wall St and I think Stein tried to weave something blatantly illegal into the mix to try and effect some change. However I think Ben Stein got it wrong going for the jugular when he suggested that GS were running another strategy alongside that double dealing strategy.

The Stein hypothesis says that GS were not only betting against the sub-prime paper that they were selling hand over fist, but one of their senior analysts was systematically spinning a dire story of an impending housing market meltdown. In effect, GS is accused of using its massive and sneaky clout to lay the foundations for a housing crisis. How unethical is that double standard, if true?

The trouble is, I don't think Goldman Sachs needed to tell a senior analyst to spin the end to a housing bubble. Even before these dodgy sub-prime loans came along, housing bubbles have always occurred in over-heated economies. If anything, the analyst could be accused of conducting a sick documentary on the impending implosion in the credit and housing market, but market manipulation? Maybe, but more likely, Stein is shooting the messenger.

As someone with no interest in any financial company except E-trade, where we bank and hold some stocks, I think Ben Stein got the last piece of the conspiracy theory totally wrong, and should have concentrated on roasting every company except GS for falling so badly into the sub prime trap. GS knew that greed would win and sub-prime mismanagement would fuel the housing crisis, they just supplied the fuel! A bit like selling bullets and being accused of murder when someone fires it from a gun!

A sure fire investment

Anyway, if any investors have a spare $25, make a micro-loan to an entrepreneur in a developing country, via Kiva and appear in the graphic below. There is no sub-prime issue and you will get your money back (assuming you think 0.2% risk of non-payment is a fair indicator of a return!)

According to the latest ready reckoner from the Business Opportunities website, this blog is worth almost $56,000. The amount is a fictitious one, unless I am mistaken, but it does at least give you a gauge that is enlightening, in a money-grabbing capitalist kind of way. Money talks. Or does it?

Slowly does it

Wouldn't you rather have a website with 56,000 daily visitors and no income? Yes, if it were a blog, I would! Because with that much traffic, I would have a sound base from which to monetize the site at any time in the future. The John Chow character currently with all the readers in the world waited till he had a ton of traffic before he started to add in ads and nonsense paying posts and all sorts of revenue generators. Viola, as the illiterate Frenchman said, he built up his income to $10 or $12k per month and still his readership grows. Opportunistic and successful with it, he invested in his high readership stats and made them pay.

You need to act fast sometimes

Another smart guy (sorry I can't find the post!) came up with an idea for a site, but he wasn't so lucky with the money-making angle. He put his single page of digital genius online and attracted 40,000 visitors in no time. He was frantically asking around for advice on how to monetize his site, but by the time he took the decision to place a single Adsense block above the sole piece of info on the web page, the novelty wore off, numbers plummeted and he lost out.

Digg is another example of how poor judgement at monetization time can lose you everything - unless you have the luck of the Rose. A few months ago, Digg were offered $100m to sell. The founders were like tongues hanging out saying Yes, yes, Yes. The board said No, they wanted $150m. Apart from the adrenalin rush coming to nothing, it seemed like no big issue at the time. Their pay day was assured at some time in the future.

However, when that fiasco blew up over a set of HD-DVD encoding numbers, Digg teetered on the brink of losing everything. What would the management have said had the legal eagles nailed their ass to a post and that pay day had been buried forever? Gulp! Open another beer, and let's vodcast, probably

On balance

As editor of the Pisstakers, I would rather have the traffic and then generate revenue as subtly and fairly as possible, ie ensure that the readers who built the site up, don't get hammered with a poorer blogging experience. And if the monthly numbers are sufficiently ritzy then I am sure some enterprising so-and-so will make me an offer in order to ride on the coat tails of my success.

Relax, I am definitely open to offers. A one-off payment would do me fine. Somewhere in the region of $2.2m, my desired sell out price and guaranteed to keep me blogging for a few years yet!!

The search from Swicki just keeps on accumulating interest. Compared to Google searches, it is miniscule, but it seems to appeal to a fair few users every day and over time, I am sure it will actually have some tradable value. Hell, if you can sell old postcards...

The key feature of a Swicki is that it is very web 2.0, user-modifiable search engine. So you can search your blog name for instance, and then add in your own description, proper and informative for future searchers' benefit. I suppose it is a bit like the Technorati WTF feature where you can go to town expounding/expanding on a topic to your heart's content.

To be honest it makes me wonder why people got to The Pisstakers to search. And for pantone? Maybe they want to know the colors of the website to rip it off!!!

Mention Adsense and you get different reactions depending on which side of the blog fence you sit.

Bloggers attitude to adsense

Bloggers are looking for ways to monetize their material and one of the first ports of call is Google. They are the biggest fish in the pond. On their Adsense journey, bloggers may think any of the following:

Adsense will make me loads of money now.

According to money making guru John Chow, he makes 10% of his $12k monthly revenue from Google Adsense. I also read of people making 50 cents a month, or nothing. Obviously, your mileage may vary as to whether Adsense brings you riches, or not. The key is, if you have a big readership, Adsense should earn you some money.

Hassle incorporating the code

Google Adsense code is based on Javascript. For WordPress users, apparently, a break tag is automatically added to every line of code you paste into a template, causing issues. It is the same with my software, Rapidweaver, and probably in others that I don't know about, (maybe you do?) Anyway, the options for Wordpress users are: to work some code monkey magic, or do as Steve did on his tech blog and use a special plug-in Adsense Deluxe.

Rapidweaver users should highlight any Adsense code included in a post and press Cmd full stop. What others do, I don't know. Either way, it isn't that simple a job to incorporate the Google code into your blog on a whim, although it is getting easier.

Design challenges to incorporate Adsense into a theme

Hands up if your blogging theme was specifically designed with advertisements in mind? The majority of theme designers seem to just assume that the blogger will work out a style and placement of Adsense ads once the theme is up and running. This reliance on non-designer input at the critical stage of ad placements must explain the dire state of the many blogs peppered with tasteless commercial Adsense crap.

I have to say this aspect of theme design is where the Pisstakers designer, Bonsai Studio, deserves a huge round of applause. The Rapidweaver theme was practically built around that one looping ad space that you see under the left side navigation bar. (Interestingly, it was not designed to incorporate Adsense ads, but that's for another point.)

Readers attitude to Adsense

I am a reader too, and I have a different Adsense oriented perspective to a blogger when I surf.

Euh, commercial ugly Adsense interfering with my reading time.

I go to a site that seems to have some good posts waiting for me. Bingo, shite! The first thing I have to do is process the fact that there is text that has nothing to with the title of the post, right there in my line of vision. Or, in many atrocious instances, the only text you see above the fold is a bank of Adsense ads, and you have to scroll down to start reading any content. Get out of here, loser blogger, next thought.

Euh, this blogger is trying to "make" me click away from this site

I have noticed that some bloggers don't want sticky content ie they don't want people to stay, but to click on ads. Fair enough, Adsense is your friend. But if you want curious and committed readers, be more judicious.

Oh, that's an interesting product in that list of ads, let me find out.

At last, a positive thought about Adsense. Man, I was really thinking about investigating a nose hair plucker, thanks blogger, here it is, and now I can leave your site and find out all about this amazing product. That is a positive, at last.

Conclusion

Basically, my take on Adsense is - use it in huge moderation.

And what is it with gurus on Adsense who advocate you use a layout where between 40% and 100% of viewers' first sight of your homepage is Adsense, and then woo you with the research that they get 10% of their income from those ads! Dumb advice, surely. For a 10% return you give Adsense 10% of your theme real estate, or if that space allocation won't get you 10% of your income return, advise people to not think so highly of the efficiency and usefulness of Google Adsense.

I know The Pisstakers won't ever be an Adsense whore, I don't have the space, for one. For two, I am learning that there are so many other ways to generate an income without stimulating so many negatives from readers. Think before you Adsense. What do you guys think of Adsense?

One thing The Pisstakers can't be accused of is filling humor fans' eyeballs with Adsense. In my opinion, there is no need to be overtly commercial, as there are so many more subliminal ways to skin visitors to a blog . (That is a joke btw, there are no income streams whatsoever on this web site.) However there is a looping display box in the left side bar that could be construed as advertising space. I want to offer a spot on it to 7 humor-related bloggers.

Brohans currently loop through a few thousand times a month, as does number 9 in the imaginary dream team, the designer at Bonsai Studio. They pay not a penny, and apparently do get some traffic from this PR5 site of dubious descent.

If you are serious about blogging in a humorous way and you would be fair-minded enough to post about The Pisstakers from time to time, a free spot is yours for a few months. 28588 page views last month even if divided between 9, amounts to 3000 freebie views each, and in theory that number should rise. Contact Ed.