Life in the Blue

Well, it’s official. I have been cancelled. Despite all arguments to the contrary, apparently it is possible for a blogger to be cancelled. Now I know what it would feel like to be on The OC. One day you are living the good life in the blue, making fun of the chicks in Mission Viejo, and the next day you are yesterday’s reef sandals.

In early April Google announced they would be switching the blue adwords background to yellow, leaving my ‘lifeintheblue’ domain about as useful as Brent Musburger’s commentary about the game of college basketball or the west coast offense. I had been seeing some blue and some yellow for the past month, but it appears it is all yellow all day now, leaving me rather…well…blue.

The part I don’t get is that now you have to click on the title of the ad in order to be taken to the lading page of the ad. Before you used to be able to click anywhere on the ad. I would think this would lower the overall CTR of pay per click ads. But perhaps it increases the amount of quality clicks, since it would be much harder to accidentally click on a PPC ad, resulting in fewer bounces.

Of course I can only assume Google has my best interests in mind. With no real way to do some sort of control testing, it is hard to tell if the new gold way is making a difference in click thru rate. But I trust Google. I trust Google to watch me while I sleep at night, take care of me when I am sad, or protect me from the evils of life in the real world. I am sure they know what they are doing. There has got to be either an increase in CTR, or decrease in bounce rate with the gold set up. Google doesn’t do things just because they woke up and felt like doing work just for the sake of work.

So, lifeintheblue readers, this is our last blue dance. Enviseo tells me that blogging is uncool anyway. It was a passing fad around here that came and went just as fast as America’s fascination with Hanson. And I trust Enviseo too. People follow him to know what jeans to wear, food to eat and music to listen to. So it is probably best to follow his advice on when and when not to blog as well.

I will still be around, to lend my help, advice and tender loving care here and there. I considered doing a 301 to lifeinthegold, but some people haven’t had success with that, so I think I will stick with this domain, it has grown on me.

So if you can’t sleep at night, still check it out, and hopefully my continued mastery of the English language and written word will sooth your otherwise restless soul.

Point being, if three years ago you had told me I would be maintaining a blog, I would have called you a monkeys uncle. So I don’t view this as a failure. This is a success. I aimed so low, that even since I succeeded, no one cared. Abandon hope all ye who enter.

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