by A site without ads is not something you see everyday. Especially now that with AI and the ease that people have to generate “content”, you can generate a lot of junk that can then attract clicks and therefore sell ads. Look at any place that “sells attention”, like blogs, YouTube, social media, etc and you’ll see more and more this. Actually if you look at some Shorts you’ll see that there’s a lot of content that is borrowed (stolen) from someone else with an AI voice on top of it. Or you’ll also find things like “how I make X millions in my 20’s by posting stuff on YouTube” (I’ve made this one up but I’m sure that you’ll get results if you search for it).
The idea is simple. Generate spammy content that brings attention and Google or any other ad network will reward you for your service.
I don’t like this. At all.
Examples of good ads
There are a lot of sites that have tasteful ads. Sites like the BBC for example.
Note something? The front page doesn’t have one ad. But I can see you already thinking about it, so I’ll preempt with the following from the “about page”.
Established by a Royal Charter, the BBC is principally funded through the licence fee paid by UK households. Our role is to fulfil our mission and promote our Public Purposes.
Don’t get me wrong, BBC has ads on the site. We have to thank (even if sometimes they are annoying) for the cookie permissions. If you refuse all this is what you get. Don’t believe me? You can get exactly the same in CNN if you deny all cookies, at least if you’re in Europe. Here’s what BBC looks like if you accept the cookie notice.
Apart from the absurd size of the ad, it’s not as crappy as some other websites. The page looks amazing, right!
Examples of bad ads
Now let’s look at a crappy example. I opened a random website the other day and was greeted with this.
So not only you don’t get what you’re looking for, but you’re already paying an “entry fee”. I think this makes more harm than good to a brand, since they are showing you that pressing the button (whatever it is) is more important than the service they are providing.
Here’s another example of something that is not quite an ad, but almost.
I was looking at this site a popup launched and then when I tried to read the article that’s what I saw. It was impossible to do read anything, while the site was already trying to pull you to explore something else. Notice that I’m in a small device which makes things even worse. They are more interested that you open pages than read what’s in each of them .
I want to make something clear. Journalism should be paid and sites need money to survive. Things are hard now for some venues and quality journalism is quite expensive. One can also argue that there are publications that are doing a lot of good and are not violating their principles. There’s a line between being a journalist, a person dedicated to bring you the news and especially the truth (debatable for some but let’s not go there), and publications that are only interested in making articles that you can click to sell you ads.
Finally, I’ve touched on this before but not having control on what ads are displayed can be super damaging, and we’ve seen over and over again attackers are using Google (and others) to serve ads that are SPAM and could compromise your machine. I don’t want this responsibility on me, in case you are unlucky and get scammed by an ad that is displayed on my website.
Privacy
Ad networks are hugely incentivised to know everything about you. The more they know the better they can target you, the more you click and the more money they make. But this is not done, in my opinion, in a tasteful way. It’s done in a quite predatorily way, where based on multiple signals from your interaction with sites they collect all the information they can. Companies like Apple and DuckDuckGo are making a huge effort to curb these types of profiling, and if you use browsers like DuckDuckGo’s browser or Safari for example, you can be a bit safer against these types of unwanted data collection.
If you don’t believe me here’s an example, for a website that provides explanation on how to do simple things (I won’t name the website because this happens everywhere).
The default message is as follows:
If you accept right away you will be granting access to “143 TCF vendor(s) and 63 ad partner(s)”. But if we click “manage options”, here’s what we get:
What kind of “legitimate interest” do you think they have to share your information with 63 ad partners?
And this is something that we can see in Europe. In the US or other countries where these types of things are optional or where companies try to hide this it’s even worse, because it’s done without you even knowing it.
I’m not against ads. I’m against ad networks that take your information away without you knowing it. The “legitimate interest” was clearly written by lawyers, so I can’t blame them, but they are at least transparent. They collect the information so that they can make money selling ads. They tell you that they will share that information. If you’re comfortable with it, great, if not they will still give you the article.
Website “ethos”
When I created this website I had two things in mind:
- Learn about stuff
- Show everyone else what I’ve learned.
This was (and still is) my strategy and it brought me a lot of good things over the years. I learn something new, write about it and then learn more with the feedback. Writing things down is an excellent way to learn and to commit things into memory. It’s also a great way for you to consolidate knowhow and generate new ideas. You have no idea how many times I stop writing an article to add a new idea to the list of articles to write. This is because I start thinking of parts that need to be explored further or things that are not related with the article but also would be interesting to learn and explore.
But it takes a while to generate good articles. You time to write, to make the screenshots and overall for things to make sense. And after that, there’s always mistakes, meaning that you have to go back and correct them. It’s time that we spend without having a direct return and that’s were people get demonised quite quickly.
I’ve also made a huge effort so that the site looks good. And by huge effort I’ve tried hundreds of templates to see what would be one that I would like. I would never do one myself, otherwise you would run away as soon as you opened the page.
So, after all of this work, why would anyone want to show your final work in a crappy way, filled with blinking things that you cannot control. It’s like going to a fantastic restaurant and having the chef cook you an amazing dish, but before it’s presented to the waiter, the waiter puts a coupon code for MacDonalds on the side of your dish. Or having the bride at a wedding wear her beautiful white dress with an ad to “how to get slim” in the front. You get my point.
Am I against ads?
Not at all! In fact I played with the idea in the past about doing it and even added some test ones for a brief period on the top of the site.
Some can say that the “hire me” is an ad and that’s true. I also have a small mention on the side that I can try to help you. But this is quite different in my perspective. First it’s not blinking or trying to trick you into clicking it. It blends with the website. Also, it’s a service that I provide and it’s completely optional, meaning that if you don’t want or need help, you have all the value that I can provide with the article without having to give me anything.
So it’s possible that I publish ads in the site in the future. I’m writing this article already as an explanation and to point people to it if they say I’m doing something wrong.
How can I make money?
So the final question is, how do I make money if not for ads? My company “Skillful Sardine” supports this site, meaning I make money selling consultancy sessions and providing services to companies and people. With this, I can help the site and keep it as close to the original “ethos” as possible.
Other products, sections, and services may be available here. That’s okay. It’s both a way for me to make money and for you to get value, but always with you in control and me sleeping well at night. We both benefit from it. That’s it. Simple and without having to sell your data to anyone.
You can follow me on Mastodon (new account), Twitter (I’m getting out, but there are still a few people who are worth following) or LinkedIn. Or email works fine as well 🙂
Photo by Wojtek Witkowski on Unsplash
