My apple: The necessary evil of advertising

We will over the coming weeks make a few changes to the site to accommodate online ads. At first we’ll put in Google ads but we’re already working with local companies to put their ads in, which makes the advertising more relevant to our readers. Just before writing this I enabled Google ads in our RSS feed.

Personally I usually don’t like seeing ads online and particularly in RSS feeds. Especially the RSS feed ad is an experiment and we’ll see how it works out before we make a final judgement about whether to keep it. But we know that advertising money is moving online as advertisers find, correctly or not, that it’s more cost effective to advertise online.

Let's hope it won't turn out looking like this

I read yesterday somewhere that online advertising in the US contracted over the recent period. Now I can’t find the reference for that but it seems to make sense. Advertising in our region is also going through some tough times as companies are cutting back on advertising spending when revenues decline.

There is still advertising spending going on although it might not be as much as before. We’re seeing progress when it comes to Shufflegazine and we will continue to bring you the only Apple lifestyle magazine in the Middle East.

In print I think it’s different than online. Take newspapers, for example. Today I read through newspapers to a large extent to see the ads, not so much for the stories. We hear from Shufflegazine readers too that they like seeing ads in the magazine. Not too many ads perhaps but ads nonetheless.

We will see how this experiment unfolds. How effective ads are and what readers think is something we’ll certain keep close attention to.