So yeah, I sold my soul once again and added Google Adsense. Don't give me shit. I know I work at Yahoo! - but I don't even know if they offer a service like adsense. Screw it.
This morning, everything looked fine. Ads were for dedicated servers, BSD blogs - I'm cool with all that. That's the type of ad my readers would be interested in.
I just now looked at the ads - and this is a bunch of crap. Ann Coulter is a raging lunatic with a ferret stuck up her ass. Why the hell is my ad bar being pro-democrat and pro-Ann Coulter? I hate both. I'm like, a libertarian or something. If I cared, that is. And I don't. I live in California. We have the goddamn Terminator.
What on earth is going on with these ads? And why has my number of daily visitors increased about 200% to 1,800 - 2000 visitors a day? It doesn't appear that there's a referrer. What gives, internet?
I love being invited to buy Ukranian women while reading about FreeBSD!
Yahoo! Publisher Network
http://publisher.yahoo.com/sell/ContentMatch.php?loc=USYPN0005
Of course, currently I'm seeing adsense ads for, well, adsense... :p
The systems Google uses to match content with ads are far from perfect.
More importantly, the system reacts to the text found on the page -- if the system can't figure out what your them or topic is, it will throw up some nearly random ads, and try to figure out what, if anything, people are clicking on (and then it will pay attention to whether the people who clicked on an ad actually "converted" for the advertisers).
Give it a few weeks, and the mix of ads will tend to settle down, and most likely will be more pleasing and logical than what you are seeing at the moment.
At the moment, I'm seeing a mix of ads that are highly relevant to the topics of "Google" "Adwords" and "Adsense" -- actually quite a good match.
One reason your traffic has suddenly jumped is probably just that some bloggers have noticed some of your posts, and linked to them -- certainly, the above post is relevant to bloggers interested in Google and Adsense, even if they don't normally spend much time thinking about freebsd.
Generally there'd be referrers though.
If there aren't any referrers, then it may mean links from RSS feeds or emails or something like that - some of my sites get a lot of 'direct' traffic that way