Considering a Sponsor

As some of you may know, I’m not a big fan of advertising, and I made a decision when I started this blog to keep it free of ads. In particular, I assumed that the tiny amount of revenue I might generate via AdSense would not offset the cost of annoying or even losing readers. And, back in June, I even questioned the taint of sponsorship in discussions at Mashable and WinExtra.

But last week a reader approached me with an intriguing sponsorship offer. Steve Lewis runs a startup called Hire Reach that targets job ads based on contents of technical articles. You can see an example ad below in a screenshot from the IT Inform site. Steve tells me that the system not only matches content with appropriate ads, but also provides interested job seekers with a direct contact to hiring managers, bypassing the usual HR rigmarole in large companies.

A couple of caveats:

• They haven’t worked with blog content before.
• The targeting is only useful if their inventory includes jobs that match my content.

I hope it goes without saying that I would never modify my content to suit a sponsor. I have my own biases that surely come through in my writing, but they are mine, not my employer’s or any one else’s.

So, assuming that the system would produce relevant job ads, and that I can include them using a much smaller portion of screen real estate than the InformIT site, how do folks here feel about the idea? Please be candid with your concerns, either through comments here, or privately by emailing me at dtunkelang at gmail dot com.