Jason Calacanis announces that Weblogs Inc has reached his target of $2,000 a day on Google Adsense:

‘It took us just over seven months (from September 2004 to April 2005) to go from $0 to $1,000, and about six weeks to go from $1,000 to $2,000. The increase was based on traffic gains and adding Google Adsense for RSS. We’re also involved in one other unannounced Google Adsense program that makes our sites a little more targeted (I can’t go into details on it, but it’s not having a huge impact).’

It’s interesting to watch him debating himself on whether to include ads inside content though.

‘Now, we didn’t do any more shifting of the ad position. I’m not willing—at least at this time—to wrap our content around the ad box…. it just looks really cheap (no offense to my friends who are doing it).

We spend a decent amount making out sites look good (we did a bad job and the start, now we’re kicking butt with things like www.divester.com and www.cinematical.com), and I just don’t want to destroy that for an extra $200-300 a day. Yes, I know that’s $6,000 to $9,000 a month and $72,000 to $108k a year, and that is a lot of of money, but you have to draw the line at some point. Actually, I think I may have just convinced myself to do it. :-)’

The emphasis is mine. I can’t find the post in his archives but I seem to remember a previous post that was a lot more adamant that they’d never consider such an approach – maybe it was in an interview or article.

I wonder if we should start a book on when they’ll start experimenting with in content ads for a bit of fun.

You see I think it could be more lucrative than the $200-$300 per day that Jason mentions it could be worth (which in itself would be a handy $108,000 per year). As I say in comments to Jason – my experience on ads inside content that are well positioned is that they can increase CTR by as much as 100%. There is not too many moves you can make that double your income in one move. Of course the 100% factor might be an overestimation in Weblogs Inc’s case as they have some well positioned ads already – but I’d guess it’ll go up by more than 10% – 15%.

Of course there is the ‘ugliness’ factor which I do agree with. However as I look at my stats – I can’t see any of my blogs that decreased their traffic since turning ‘ugly’. Maybe readers don’t mind so much as we might think? Interesting debate.

What do you think? What would you do if you were Jason?

Feedburner have just announced that they can add Adsense RSS ads to their publishers feeds if those publishers are already approved by Adsense.

I’m testing Adsense ads on one or two of my feeds (or will be when they start appearing) but you won’t see them on ProBlogger.net at this point because it is a WordPress Blog which is not supported by Adsense for feeds yet.