Here at 2River: July 2004 Archives

Sad to say, according to these Alexa statistics, 2River isn't among the top 100,000 sites on the web. Alexa derives its statistics from those millions of users who use the Alexa tool bar, but there probably wouldn't be much movement up or down if every user in the world were using the toolbar.

Nonetheless, the bright side! The Alexa traffic rank for 2River is 1,333,894. Boutell.com estimates that there are 43 million top-level domains. If I remember how to calucate percentage (1,333,894/43,000,000) 2River is among the top 3% of sites on the web.

So it goes.

For a brief few minutes today the 2River home page carried ads from Google. A website costs money--web hosting, software, the new laptop, printing costs for the print issues of 2RV and chapbooks, postage. Over the years I've looked at ways to recoup some of those costs but an elegant way always seemed elusive. Plus I've never been comfortable with asking for donations, for example, via PayPal. A visual artist friend in Texas says I do 2River for art's sake.

Still, I was thinking Google's AdSense would be an unobstrusive way of making a few cents. All I do is use some Google code which places content specific ads on a 2River web page. It's summer, Ann says I have too much free time at hand, so today I worked on adding the code. But much to my disappointment the content specific ads pointed to vanity poetry sites. You can see what I mean by googling POETRY and looking at the sponsored links. In hindsight, I understand that once Google's spider identifies poetry as the content of 2River, AdSense returns those sites that have paid to be Sponsored Links.

Perhaps I'm being delusional and elitest to think 2River's not the place for links to vanity poetry sites. I've written elsewhere that reputable online poetry sites need to avoid the appearance of being vanity sites. Links to vanity sites would blur that separation, and I'm not comforatable with making a penny or two whenever someone comes to 2River and clicks away to another site whose purpose is somehow get the writer to pay money for the printing of his or her poetry.

And that was the end of 2River's brief association with AdSense.