Sat, 04 Apr 2009

Ad Free As In Freedom

Well, I finally got around to adding some of the old "bumper stickers" to my sidebar this morning. And changing my pciture. And adding a new logo - "No Marketing Zone, Proudly Blogging for Free". There no real site associated with it, the logo just says it all. But it doesn't say why, and that's important.

I had originally considered following The Wild Hunt, and making this an Ad Free Blog. But the main thrust of that little campaign seems to be that commerce will influence content: that bloggers will kow-tow to advertisers. Frankly, given the nature of syndication these days, that's ridiculous. I'd guess that 99% of all blogs that have advertising have syndicated ads. And there's no way to know what ads Google, Yahoo or DoubleClick will serve on your blog before they're already on there. Thus no chance to influence.

My reason for being ad free is twofold: first off, when I tried out Adsense they served all kinds of offensive ads. Offensive to me, that is. If I blogged about heathenry, they served church ads. If I blogged about grass fed beef, I got ads for Texas Roadhouse and Outback. This was several years ago, and maybe they've improved a bit, but it's not worth it to me. I got exactly $0 from the effort and it ran for a couple of months. What's the point of that?

But perhaps more fundamentally, I'm just sick to death of advertising. It's everywhere - you can't even use a public restroom anymore without finding yourself staring at a billboard, either over the urinals or in the stalls. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has printed ads on the toilet paper somewhere.

And on the Net, by the gods, the ads are absolutely everywhere. Flashing, barking, video, Javascript, popups: the more desperately they try to get my attention the more resolutely I ignore them. Some of them are cute, some are actually informative, but it's getting harder and harder to cut through the noise to find the music.

The technical name for SPAM is "unsolicited commercial email". Leave off the "email" and that pretty much sums up all advertising, eh?

So why clutter up the blog with annoying, offensive ads for no renumeration? I couldn't think of a good reason, either.

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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