13 Replies

I like the math guy ad. hes the one ad i can rely on in public.

id make a pattern out of the mustached math man

@xXNo_One_Cares_BearXx: Nah, we have had ads on the sites from very early on, and the site is actually less popular now than it was in about 2010-2011, even though more people are interactive on it now. The increased interaction gives the illusion of it being more popular, but it's not. We used to have a lot more visitors.

@goopyguy: Please don't encourage ad blockers. This site costs hundreds of dollars a month to keep online, and the only way I can afford that is via ads. If too many visitors start to use ad blockers, I will be forced to shut the site down. I've only been able to keep it online for this long due to the ads. There have been times where I've been unemployed for years yet the site was still able to remain online, and that's all thanks to the ads which have at least mostly covered the hosting costs even during slower periods. Without ads this site would have shut down in about 2014 because that's when my finances took their first dive.

This goes for lots of other small websites too. Ad blockers kill us. If you want to support small websites and keep them online, keep ads displayed at least most of the time. I don't have them on 100% of the time for myself because I use two different computers/browsers, but as long as they're on most of the time, it's fair in my opinion. The same thing goes for your favorite YouTube creators: watch the ads if you want to support them and keep their channel going. You're choosing to not support them by skipping ads every time. I only skip occasionally.

Because of the social nature of the site, it's difficult to find ad networks which will accept the site onto it, which is why we've got this one I'm not a huge fan of which tends to add more obtrusive ads. But I have some degree of control via settings and can complain to them. With this maths ad though, I need to make it pop up again for myself before I can try to block it, so bear with me.

I'd love to get us onto a different ad network that doesn't change settings on me constantly, but so far none have been willing to engage with me.

Sorry for another ad rant. I do this about once a year but I think it's important that people know the ads matter. I know they're annoying. They annoy me too, but they're a necessary evil. Costs are constantly increasing with all the services we use to keep the site online as well. Early on in the site's development I used a lot of Amazon services to improve uptime and ensure we wouldn't lose images after our server died and lost some of the images, but they're expensive. And at this point it would be extremely difficult to move away. We also have an anti-hacker service, an anti-spam service, an image upload service... all with monthly fees. And that's not even everything. But like the ads, without all of these, we probably would have gone offline already. They keep the site safe. With it being so old, it's very vulnerable and needs all of the protection it can get.

@P1nk_Mal1bu_Barb13: https://kandipatterns.com/questions/18548/is-it-me-or-have-i-seen-a-bunch-or-more-ads-everywhere

@oblivx0us: the ads pay for the website and I believe Crumpets has said something in the past about how they don't really control what they are (I'll try and find the comment just to make sure my brain just didn't make that up lol)