Hey loyal Blondihacks readers,

I wanted to take a moment to talk about the advertising content on this site. You may have noticed that it’s gone. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief about that.

When I first started this site, I signed up with Google’s AdSense in order to hopeful defer a bit of the substantial cost of running the blog. The nice thing about Google’s service is that it’s non-intrusive, and the ads are really well matched to the content in the posts, so it’s actually content that readers might appreciate. Unfortunately, I made the innocent mistake of writing “Please support our sponsors” under one of the ad boxes. In short order, some sort of AdSense validation bot noticed that text, and banned me from AdSense for life. You see, it’s against their rules to “incentivize users to click ads”. That policy makes sense, but you can imagine my shock to find that my off-handed little blurb of text met that criteria. Even worse, there’s no appeals process or customer service available for AdSense. The bot made the decision to blacklist my URL, so I can never again sign up for AdSense without registering a new domain (and possibly setting up a new bank account).

I spent a lot of time and effort trying to reach someone at Google to clear up what’s obviously a simple misunderstanding, but did not get anywhere. Eventually, I gave up and signed up for two other services, Project Wonderful and AdBrite. I hoped one or both of them would be close to as good as Google was for matching ads to my content. Unfortunately, AdBrite went out of business recently. That’s just as well, because they were largely responsible for the “One Weird Trick” type of spam/scam ads that are covering the internet and are really obnoxious to look at. AdBrite allows you to filter out specific ads, and I spent a lot of time going through hundreds of those ads, filtering them one by one to try and keep that crap off Blondihacks. It was a losing battle.

Project Wonderful has been relatively scam-ad free, but the content is very poorly matched to the blog. It was showing signs of improving, so I stuck with it in the hopes it would start to offer more technical content. It started as a service primarily for web comics, which is why there were so many web comic ads coming from it. I knew they were trying to diversify, so I gave them a chance. Well, it just hasn’t happened, and I’m tired of looking at the irrelevant ads covering my site.

Frankly, none of these services every paid me a dime anyway, so it was all pretty pointless. Google may have earned a little, since their content was so well matched, but I wasn’t with them long enough to find out, and now never will (unless I go through the cost, expense, and lost users of moving to a new domain). The punishment just doesn’t fit the crime, sometimes.

The bottom line is, I’m giving up on the ads, and I’ve added a donation button to the bottom of each article. I’ve received generous donations in the past from readers who have gone through the trouble of clicking over to my company site (http://www.quinndunki.com), and I’m hugely appreciative of that. Thanks again to all of you who have done that. With easier access to the Donate button, if a few more of you are feeling generous, click away. If not, that’s okay too- I love that people read the site and take the time to comment. We’ve exchanged a lot of great technical information in the comment threads over the years, and that’s the most important thing to me.

Either way, Blondihacks will keep running. Thanks again to everyone who reads the site. It’s been a great 2½ years, and I hope for many more to come.

-Quinn

PS. Don’t miss the new Veronica article right below this one- I booted it off the front page with this note, so if you don’t use my RSS feed, you might miss it.

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