Feeling the need to achieve a bit of passive income I've investigated the possibility of adding ads to this site. I tried it out once last year and was not happy with the results. Since then I've received two e-mails of companies claiming to be more lucrative than adwords. Half intrigued I decided to e-mail them back to see what they'd offer me.
Neither of them was worth it. The first one will pay me 16GBP per link if placed inside one of my articles in a relevant context and 8GBP for a link with description at the end of an article. It seems to be a one-time payment, I don't know if/when the deal expires. I am mildly disgusted.
But not nearly as disgusted as I am with the second company. The person who contacted wanted me to post a bullshit blogspam article about some technical topic, randomly interspersed with keywords hardly related to the topic. I can't believe people would go for that. You must be really desperate to do a thing like that, destroying the internet with your fake content. People who do this should get a yearlong ban from the internet and companies that advertise like that should be fined tens of thousands of pounds or dollars or whatever.
So there you have it. I'm not willing to sell my soul yet. If I ever do have ads on my page I'll probably go with adsense or something unobtrusive. And since most of my traffic are one-time visitors from search engines, I'll add an option for the regular visitors to turn them off. But for now, this website remains free.