RickInOz

… any advertising on this blog.

Most of you will have noticed that practically every website is littered with advertising. These can be in the form of intrusive pop-ups through to subtle text-based contextual links. Most webmasters have grown savvy and realised that most people don’t like being bombarded with garish images so resort to more inconspicious methods.

However the result is the same with page space given over to adverts rather than genuine content. I don’t like this approach and have taken the decision not to put advertising on this site for the following reasons:

1. They detract from the overall feel of a site and, in my opinion, make it look cheap.
2. Most people know what Google is and can use that to find products and services rather than being enticed by advertising.
3. I don’t approve of much of the served advertising on many blogs and other sites. When signing up for such services you get very little control over what content is contained in the adverts, and cannot veto products you disapprove of or have a moral objection to.
4. There are plenty of blogging companies like Blogger and WordPress offering free hosting.
5. Revenue from providing adverts is pitiful. Companies like Google encourage people to sign up and host products like Adsense. What they don’t make obvious is that you only get sent money when you clock up $100 credit, you only get credit when someone actually clicks on one of the adverts and the payment for one of these clicks is pathetic (in the order of a couple of cents). Therefore you don’t need to be a maths genius to work out that you need a lot of visitors clicking on a lot of your adverts before you actually see any money.
6. Even if, like me, you own your domain (the bit between the “www” and “.com” ) and your own hosting space (the hard disk space and accompanying services on a host‘s servers), you don’t need to spend that much money. I pay a little over $100 a year and that gives me almost unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Surely most people who really feel their opinions are worth reading can spare $100 each year.

Fortunately it seems I’m not the only one with this attitude. One blogging team have become so sick of seeing ad-cluttered websites that they have started their own online campaign advocating other proudly state theirs is a: