Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Oct 13, 2006

A few years back I ran into a service called Affero. The gist was that if you were on a forum and found somebody's post useful, you could donate a small amount of money to that person as a way to say 'Thank You'. It was billed as a way to encourage contribution and participation on the Internet.

I have no idea how those guys are doing, but I wonder if the entire concept has been somewhat replaced with Text Ads? Text advertising is everywhere these days... some of you (who haven't adblocked it) even see the Google Adwords on the right side of this blog. Other services, like Kontera, are even putting text links in the actual context of the article. (You can see that on OSNews for example)

On a typical day I get about 400 visitors (thanks for stopping by!) Corresponding to that, I get a rate of about 1 click every other day (about 25 cents per week so don't get too excited). I have no idea whether people are genuinely interested in the ads or whether, to reward me for writing a good article, they may click on an advert. But I suspect, in this Internet and Digg age, that advertising only goes so far for a technology related blog.

Any ad clickers out there want to share their motivation? Did something catch your eye or are you just helping to cover bandwidth costs?