For the longest time I’ve had Google Adsense on this site.  I figure if I can make a few bucks here and there, that’s fine.  I create a lot of content here, but I also have been running Google ads on the site.   Today I looked into that situation, and came to a conclusion about the ads…

First, a little background.

Last night, I watched my wife reading the review I wrote for Empire Strikes Back on her iPad, and I was annoyed to see that Google had inlined ads IN THE CONTENT of my post.  I hate that.  Ads suck, but I get why they exist.  But the most egregious kind of ad is the kind that is in the MIDDLE OF THE CONTENT on the page.  That was annoying as shit, so today I went to Google’s settings, and decided to see what the settings were.

Indeed, it was set to allow those kinds of advertisements, so I decided to turn those off.  Don’t want those.  Then I decided to examine how much money I’d made in ads on this site, as it’s something I haven’t looked at in awhile.  10 years ago I would easily make a couple of hundred bucks a month off my site advertisements, but not anymore – that’s gone way into the toilet.  This month I’ve made a total of 46 cents in ad revenue on this site.  It was 53 cents the month before that. 24 cents in September.   You get the idea.  We’re talking around 50 cents a month MAX going back MANY a month now (with some much lower).   IMO, not worth it.

Today I made the decision to cut the advertisements totally out of my personal blog here.  I’ve opted for the traditional donation cup.  I write a lot of content here, and I get told a lot it’s interesting to folks.  I’m not going to put my stuff behind a paywall.  I’m old school web.  I’m from a time when everything was free, and everything had no paywall.  So I’m not going to charge you to read my stuff, but if you think it’s cool, and worthy, check the donation cup at the top of the page.  It’d be appreciated, and will make me feel better about dropping the ads.  :)

Thanks to my wife for reading my review sitting right next to me – I don’t see the ads on my version, because I’m logged into the site when I work on it.

As a side note, I also changed the “coat of paint” on the site.  It’s mostly the same, but I opted for a slightly different version. It wasn’t worthy of its own post, so I stuck it in here as a footnote…

One final note: If you happen to see an advertisement here after this post, please drop me a line and let me know on what page you’re seeing it. Thanks.