As you have probably guessed by now, my personal website is relatively lite on text-based content, but its photography section contains a few hundred pictures and currently (August 2005) brings in about 40,000 visitors and serves around 150,000 pages each month. The 50+ Gb of traffic it generates each month are due mostly to the viewing and downloading of photographs.
When I first thought about running ads on Hulubei.Net, it was more out of a technical curiosity than of a real desire to make money. It was not that I was opposed to the idea of making money, just that I did not think I would make any through ads. Anyway, I placed ads on pages made up of text-based content to see what happens. This turned out to generate only a little bit more than what was necessary to cover the cost of the domain name and hosting.
About a year later, I decided to experiment with running ads on all pages, including those containing photographs. To my surprise, despite the almost complete lack of text-based content on those pages (other than the title of the page and the alt attribute of the <image> tag), these additional ads increased my earnings almost 6 times.
That certainly got my attention. I spent a little bit of time in the following months learning about SEO and AdSense, looking at what other people did, following forums and trying out several ideas. In the remaining part of the article I will go over those things that I think are important to keep in mind when running ads on photo albums.