This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Via Brendan Kiley, I see that the state ferry system is going to start selling web ads.
I can’t say that I have a problem with this in theory. Governments sell ad space on visually prominent physical and virtual spaces all the time.
However, I’m pretty skeptical that this is the answer to any serious budget problems. WSDOT points to the visitor information site, ExperienceWA, as another government site that sells ads. But a quick glance over there shows the only ads being run are for another visitor information website, Seattle Southside. Making real money from web ads is incredibly difficult.
Who knows? Some state government web pages are, indeed, heavily trafficked, including the WSDOT ferry page and the highway traffic map. With any luck, they’ll be able to raise enough money to pay for the hosting costs.
Now, let’s talk about advertising on bus shelters…
I’m just disappointed they’re spending $75k to figure out if it’s worth doing or not. Seems like you could get the .com, adjust the server settings to serve both, shuffle traffic to the .com version of the page, throw on some Google AdSense and call it a day. There is monitoring and assessment to be done, sure, but still, that can’t add up to $75k.