Mega-ZBlog

I have received several e-mails lately from advertisers interested in getting their links onto my blog.

I am unsure if they are e-mails specifically targeting me or some sort of mass-e-mail to all blogs… I’m leaning toward the latter, since I never got anything like this before I moved my blog from its sub-domain to the main site.

I have not and will not ever put advertisements on my site.  My web host is happy when I put a small text link to his site in my site footer (actually I should put that back in now) but otherwise here are some conveniently numbered things I believe strongly in and will not change.

1. If a site or individual asks me to link to them, especially when I have never heard of them before, I likely never will, based on principle.
2. Any sites I do link will, 99% of the time, be because I like the site and the services it provides and want to share it with others.  It will be my own choice to share the site, without outside prompting.
3. I am not interested in monetary kickbacks for advertisements.  I don’t like ads.  I use AdBlock Plus in Firefox and I highly recommend them to everyone.  You can block ads individually or by domain, or you can go through a little extra work and setup a subscription to automatically keep your blacklist of ads updated.
4. Using Google Chrome, I started to get hit with ads again in the first time in years.  Since there’s no ad blocking for Google Chrome yet, I turned to a lower-level form of ad blocking at the OS level.  It’s not perfect (I still see a few ads, and it can’t block ads on the same domain as a legitimate website) and it doesn’t automatically update, but it’ll do for now.
5. I understand some users need ads to pay for their hosting, but blocking can’t hurt them since I have never clicked on ads anyway.  In fact it might help, since if I were to accidentally click on one and then back out of the ad site, it would register as a fake click and the website would lose money.  OK, not as good a point, but even if you disqualify it I still click just as many ads if I don’t block them.