I decided to remove all advertising from my blog. Really, it’s not as if I was making a lot of money from it anyways. But money, or the lack of it, is not why I am going 100% ad-free. The real reason is that I don’t like advertising, you don’t like advertising, and neither of us gains anything from it.

Up until now people have had to put up with ads. Ads on TV, in newspapers, in magazines, and on the radio were there to subsidize the content. “You can be informed and entertained, as long as you pay attention to these quick messages from our sponsors,” or so we were told. But on the Internet, this business model simply does not work anymore. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad? According to my AdSense stats, it was a very long time ago.

So, if people don’t pay attention to online advertising, how do you make money on it? That’s very easy, actually. You have to design horrible webpages covered with ads and full of pointless keyword articles and content targeted to get specific ads displayed. There is a whole economy around search engine optimization, and the whole point is to game the system to get more clicks which will hopefully lead to clicks on ads. In other words, your content is tailored for search engines, not for readers.

I am also going ad-free because I don’t want advertising to influence my writing. While my blog is still fairly new, I have found that the most popular posts, as far as traffic is concerned, are the ones that included popular search terms. I wrote a post about free applications for the G1 Android phone that might be useful to journalists, and it gets the most traffic from Google. That might lead me believe that I should be writing more posts like that, to get more traffic. And while that is a fairly harmless example, it’s a slippery slope to the point when I end up writing consumer reviews about products I never used in order to generate ad revenue.

Consider what newspapers did 10 years ago. They decided that the business model for the Internet would be advertising, and the more hits they could get, the more money they would make. They based their whole Internet strategy around increasing traffic, and hence they gave the content away for free. Now they have the traffic, but not the revenue. If newspaper companies would have tried to build a business model that was not based on advertising, they would be in a better position right now.

So there, I’m 100% ad-free now and I intend to keep it that way. If I do ever make any money from this blog it will be because I write or produce something valueable and original, not because I wasted your time with useless keyword-centric articles. Donations? I’m not homeless, thank you.