Ad-Free now Live – Site News

Ads appear here in a few weird and wonderful ways, no doubt in some annoying ways too. As of now you can reduce the number of ads shown for FREE and remove ads totally by subscribing.

If this site made vast sums of money then I would disable ads…it doesn’t. Sadly, the ad revenues are important enough to me to keep them going and risk annoying you.

Always Ad-Free

Regular readers may have noticed that there is some content here that is ad-free and other content which is not. This will continue. In a nutshell: ‘reviews’ tend to be ad-free by default.

Ad-Free for Supporter-Subscribers

As of now, all current Supporters with an active subscription should be able to read this entire site on any platform without ads – providing you have logged in.

These are the very small number of exceptions that everyone will hopefully be happy with.

• Partner banners/ads will still appear on the right column on desktop
• Partner banners/ads will still appear at the end of content on smartphones (ie you will probably never even see that!)
• Regular ads may appear in some RSS readers or News Readers – I can’t control that. Sorry.

Note: A Subscription is for single consumer use, not for business purposes and not to be shared.

Other Subscriber Benefits

Apart from elevating you to ‘awesome’ status, supporter-subscribers help make this site run smoother for everyone (thank you!) and have access to some of the restricted content produced here. There are also some other benefits that change from time to time and which are listed here; currently, there is a free 5K running plan for subscribers, the ability to highlight content and other stuff. Have a look.

Evil Ad Blockers

As a heads-up to any other frequent visitors, I will soon be experimenting with banning Ad Blockers, meaning that if you use an Ad Blocker you will have to use another mechanism to get around me blocking your blocker. On any given day between 1% and 20% of visitors use an Ad Blocker. Today the image below shows it’s 2.04% and the recent average is 13.19%

Imagine how you would feel about a 13.19% tax raise by the government and, well, that’s how I feel about your adblockers!

But Wait…I Have a Heart

However, I’m feeling kind. If you “follow” this site by creating a 3rd-party/external WordPress.com account and logging in then, when you are logged in, that will limit the ads that you see to only those from the Google AdSense network. Those ads tend to be high quality and not too invasive. The downsides are:

• You will still get ads shown.
• The total number of ads will be reduced
• The quality of ads should be improved
• There should be far fewer ads in the body of the content, so aiding your ability to read it all.
• WordPress.com will notify you whenever there is a new post and that’s usually once per day. The WordPress.com follow functionality does let you avoid all notifications of new content as well as supporting periodic notifications ranging from instantly to weekly here: wordpress.com

The Google AdSense network allows me to easily vary the volume and type of ads shown. So I will try to act based on any feedback you want to give on that front.

A WordPress.com account is NOT part of this site but when you link a WordPress.com account to this site to follow it I have a record of your following.

Interesting

The ads you are shown depend on what you have just been looking at to some degree. So if you or someone at your IP address has just searched for something unexpected then…well..that’s you not me! Although I have opted out of displaying naughty ads.

If you come to the site directly by simply typing in the URL then Google is less interested in serving you AdSense ads as it has no idea about your recent behaviour.

There you go.

Working with a 3rd party developer, the ad solution I now have has probably taken me a week of work in total to sort out…so outweighing any kind of revenue/salary equivalence. However, I think what I am now offering is ‘fair’ and that’s one of my personal drivers in life. Yours too, hopefully.

Musing: This site is ‘medium-sized’. My general guess would be that 99.9% of the smaller sites offering content like mine are simply not viable in the long term under the current affiliate+ad revenue models that exist, eventually, they will all stop producing the content. Luckily for you, others may fill their shoes to keep you entertained…maybe. But you will lose the experience of longstanding writers who have done this sort of work for years and replace it with someone with perhaps less knowledge. It’s your call. You eventually get what you pay for.

You may eventually be left with the option of only reading content from the larger tech sites like CNET, the Verge or magazine format sites triathlete.com. Guess what? They are even keener to monetise their content than I am mine and they face EXACTLY the same constraints regarding subscriptions, affiliate commissions and advertising, albeit on larger scales with larger cost bases.

Take Out

If you intend to come back then it makes sense to create a WordPress.com account and follow this site for free.

If you are awesome and subscribe, you will get a fully ad-free experience and other stuff too. Click on this big red button for more info…

Glossary

• Supporter – I use this term to mean a subscriber
• Subscriber – An individual with an active, paid-for annual subscription
• Follower – Someone linked to this site via standard, external WordPress features that enable customisable periodic content notifications
• Member – I use a PMS Membership plugin for this WordPress.org site. PMS use the term ‘member’ to mean what I call a subscriber.