I keep a bass fishing page called Table Rock Bass Notes. Lake reports, what's biting and where, the jigs I tie in the winter, a hand-drawn map of the coves I like that I'm probably a fool to have put up. I work the parts counter at a boat dealership here in Springfield, and I'm on Table Rock Lake most weekends from March to November, so there's always something to write.

From November 1998 to July 1999, that page ran banner ads through a banner exchange. In July I took every one of them down. Enough people on the HTML Help board asked me why that I figured I'd write it up once, with the numbers, and put it here in MadisonAvenue where the advertising folks live.

You'll notice I'm not putting the bass page's address on here. That's on purpose. It lives on my Internet provider's space, not on GeoCities.us, and anyway this page isn't an advertisement for it. You'll see why that's funny in a minute.

(The fish up top is a goldfish. GeoCities.us doesn't have a largemouth in the clip art. Use your imagination.)

I joined the Swap Shop Banner Exchange in the middle of November. A fellow on a fishing newsgroup said it had brought him a pile of visitors, and it was free, so why not. Here's the deal they offer, and most of the exchanges work about the same:

• You paste a little piece of HTML they give you onto your page. Every time somebody loads your page, a banner from the exchange shows up in that spot.
• For every two banners shown on your page, they show your banner once on somebody else's page. The other half they sell to paying advertisers. That's how the exchange keeps the lights on.
• Every banner is 468 pixels wide by 60 tall. You make your own (I made mine in Paint Shop Pro: a bass jumping and "Table Rock Bass Notes: Real Lake Reports from a Real Fisherman").
• You get a list of categories you can block from showing up on your page. Adult stuff is blocked for everybody. I also checked off gambling, dating, and money-making opportunities.
• You get a stats page that tells you how many banners showed on your page, how many times yours showed, and how many people clicked yours.

It sounds fair. Two for one, and you get a crowd of new visitors who'd never have found you otherwise. That's what I thought, too.

I wrote these down off the stats page at the end of every month. November starts on the 14th, when I joined. July stops on the 11th, when I quit.

Read that bottom line slowly. I put somebody else's advertisement in front of my readers 18,400 times. In trade, my banner went out 9,200 times, and 61 people clicked it. That's one click for about every 150 times my banner showed, and it's about 300 ads on my page for every one visitor I got back.

Sixty-one visitors in eight months. I get more than that from one good lake report the week the crappie start biting.

And those 61 were the ones who clicked. The stats page couldn't tell me how many stayed past the first screen. I'd guess a lot of them were people who clicked a fish because it was moving and were gone again before the page finished loading.

1. My readers didn't want what the banners were selling. People come to a bass page to read about bass. What showed up on mine was cheap long distance, a Y2K survival kit, a free-screensaver offer, a mortgage outfit and "Win a Free Computer!" about forty times a week. Not one fishing banner that I ever saw, and I looked at that spot a lot. You can't pick what goes on your page. You can only pick what doesn't.

2. The blocking didn't block. I had money-making opportunities checked off from day one. In June a banner showed up on my page that said you could make $5,000 a month from your kitchen table, and it ran for most of a week. I wrote the exchange. They wrote back that the advertiser had put himself under Home and Family. A fellow who reads my lake reports every Friday e-mailed me to ask, nicely, if I was getting a piece of it. I wasn't. But he had to ask, and that's the part that bothered me.

3. It slowed the page down. A lot of fishermen are on 28.8 modems, out in the country, on long phone lines. The banner doesn't come from my space; it comes from the exchange's computer, and on a busy evening that computer was slow. My page would sit there half-drawn, waiting on a banner for a mortgage company, while the lake report it was supposed to be showing waited behind it. A couple of people told me they'd quit coming because the page "hung." That's as many as the banner brought me in all of July.

4. It looked like a billboard. I ran one banner at the top and one at the bottom, because two a page got my banner shown faster. Put those on a page with a lake map and a few fish pictures and it starts looking like the highway into Branson. I never set out to have a page like that. I just wanted to tell people where the fish were.

I trade text links with other fishing pages. I find a page I'd send a friend to, I put a link to it on my links page, and I write the owner and say so. About half of them link back. No banners, no graphics to load, no swapping 2 for 1. It's the oldest deal on the Web and it still works. If you'd rather trade 88x31 buttons, Tim Lomeli's The Button Wall is a link exchange done the straight way: you put up his link, he puts up yours, family-friendly sites only, and he clicks every button on the Wall the first Sunday of every month to make sure it still goes somewhere.

I joined a WebRing. There's a bass fishing ring, and my page is on it, between a fellow on Lake Fork in Texas and a tournament angler in Alabama. People who ride a fishing ring already want to read about fishing. That's the whole difference.

I keep a good links page. Not a hundred links. Twenty-two, every one checked, every one with a line telling you what's there. Folks bookmark a good links page, and they come back to it, and they come back through you.

I got into the directories. I wrote a plain description, picked the right category, submitted it, and waited. One of them took two tries. It's slow, but nobody has to see an ad to find you that way.

Here's how it's gone. Since August 1, my guestbook has asked everybody who signs it how they found me. Twenty-three people have answered:

That's six weeks, and only the people who sign. Most people don't. Twenty-three signers in six weeks against 61 clicks in eight months. I'll take it.

Now, I'm one fishing page. If you sell something, or your page is about the same things the advertisers are selling, a banner exchange might do right by you. I'm not saying nobody should join one. I'm saying look at your stats page every month and do the arithmetic, and ask yourself whether your readers came for the banners. Mine didn't.