Thursday, September 14, 2006

Ads and Amazon: Blog policy

This is just a quick post to clarify the advertising presence on this blog.

As a general rule we believe advertising to be rather distasteful and not to be encouraged. However, we believe that Amazon links are excellent tools for the blogger to allow the reader to get more information on a related book or topic of discussion.

For example, clicking on the Lomborg link from a couple of posts ago would take the clicker to a description of the text as well as reviews (critical and otherwise) and links to related texts in the area that may be of interest.

Therefore, to add what we believe to be useful content to this site, in our sidebar we currently have three Amazon ad listings with books listed under the following headings:

1. Globalization and the Environment
2. Environmental Economics
3. Economics of Globalization

We intend to add another listing for Undergraduate text books for Envionmental Economics courses to allow students to source set texts at often a fraction of the "new" cost via the second hand market that Amazon provides. Again, this will be provided to add content to this site.

US and UK search boxes are also included. At the moment the ad listings are to Amazon.com. For UK or EU readers I think clicking and then changing the .com to your own country setting (e.g. .co.uk) brings up the local prices etc.

As you can imagine, assuming a high percentage of our readers (if there are any) are likely to be students or other academics/economists, we hold out very little hope of making any money from this exercise. The latter will usually attempt to blag a free textbook from the publishers whenever possible and in my experience it is hard enough to get our hardup students to buy even the most important set text let alone interesting but only related texts.

Our expectation is that any pennies or cents that do filter through will be used to buy a cup of coffee once every six months (maybe one each in a good period).

The only other ads we include are some google adwords at the bottom of the blog to help define the bottom of the blog as much as anything but also to provide additional content (there is some useful material actually).

Finally, we include a link to a PDF-EXCEL converter which is an excellent, tested tool, that we use and recommend (and is FREE to all academics and students so no more pennies/cents there).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know if you are aware that a "free SAT test" and "soulmate calculator" have appeared as Google Ads on your website.

This seems to contradict your policy somewhat.

Anonymous said...

Thanks - I have tried to fix it. Will remove if the problem persists.