I took the Google Adsense ads off my site last week after reading something profound about “The Circles of the Gift System” in Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin:

Many people have fretted about the economics of this cost-free spread of art in all its forms, but the real magic is the leverage this expansion adds, not the loss of commerce it causes. …

The Internet is changing the circle we call “family and friends.” … Three circles have traditionally defined the cycle of art among fine artists, such as painters and sculptors. I think these circles can work for anyone giving a gift or making a change in the world. …

The first circle represents true gifts—items that an artist gleefully and willingly shares. This circle comprises friends and family or the people you work with …

The second circle is the circle of commerce. In this circle are people and organizations that pay for your art. They pay for a souvenir edition or a poster or a speech. They pay for consulting or a house concert or a newsletter subscription …

And now, the Internet creates a third circle, the circle of your tribe, your followers, fans who may become friends. Friendlies. This circle is new. It’s huge and it’s important, because it enables you to enlarge the second circle and make more money, and because it enables you to affect more people and improve more lives. …

When you focus on the second circle, when you work to charge more people more often, your art suffers. Instead, we profit most when we make the first and third circles as big as we can. Generosity generates income. This works whether you are selling paintings or innovation or a service. …

As the third circle grows in size, the second circle takes care of itself … because as you give more and more to the friendlies, the list of people willing to pay you to do your work always grows.

This was a revelation to me not so much because it was new information, but more because it seemed to connect the dots among many things I think I knew but had not really put together. I’ve had Google ads on my site for a long time, cluttering it up and making it ugly (uglier?) in hopes that they would generate at least enough money to pay for my site hosting. They do not because my site doesn’t have sufficient traffic. And everybody hates ads anyway. I think the subliminal assumption people have been able to rightly make is that my site was intended to earn money just by being there. I was not rolling out the red carpet for visitors; I was opening the front door with my hand out. That’s no way to build an audience.

I need to follow Godin’s advice and pour everything into giving the gift of my art and let my audience grow organically. When the time comes for me to produce real products based on my art, hopefully they will become customers. But until then, I should not allow useless ads (for someone else’s products) send the wrong message about the gifts on my site. Now people can come to my site and be presented with only one branded image and message. My site is now more in line with observations from Thinking Like An Entrepreneur: How To Make Intelligent Business Decisions That Will Lead To Success In Building and Growing Your Own Company by Peter I. Hupalo: “A consumer wants to make a statement about the kind of person he is, or, at least, the kind of person he believes he is. If your product supports this self-image, the person will want to buy. If the product contradicts the person’s self-image, he will never buy it.” I should never have let Google’s advertising algorithms into that equation. I am going to focus on the people who are likely to buy from me (eventually), as Hupalo advises. I have a very specific niche of humor-loving, superhero fanboy geek service. There are plenty of us out there, as evidenced by an entire comics industry. I need to be authentic with them.

And also please stop by Ms. Innes’ site to check out her comic, The Dreamer. She put that fantastic work on hold for a month to run the CCA fundraiser. Let’s give her a hand by helping expand her fanbase!

Thanks to all, and God bless.

- Jason