Thinking About Ads on Searchblog

So I have been noodling with the idea of putting ads on Searchblog. Why? Well, I spend a fair amount of time working on the site, and a little beer money would be not a bad thing. Also, it helps me understand a market in a much more personal way. And thirdly, I’m genuinely interested in how various ad systems work. I’ve taken a look at a lot of ad systems over the past few months, many of which I have also reviewed in my role as “band manager” for boingboing.net.

I’ve looked at Henry’s BlogAds, but find them too narrow – there’s no real market of search related companies there, and I don’t want to be in the business of building it up. Of course there’s AdSense, but I prefer to not take checks from Google while I write about them. Then there’s Kanoodle, which is getting some buzz lately. And the stealth MarketBanker, which I’ve found less than ideal to communicate with (they are in something of a quiet phase – no they are not going public, just…reworking some stuff, from what I hear). There are others, and if you loyal readers care to suggest from among them, or to comment on the choices I outlined above, I’m all ears.

Then there’s the idea of simply selling sponsorships one by one, which is what Boing Boing decided to do, at least to start. But the problem with that is I don’t get to learn what it’s like to work with the ad networks. So this is my lazyweb request: What do you think I should do?