As I mentioned a few months ago, I'm experimenting with ways to help WWdN:iX bring in some revenue via advertising.
Yes, we all know that advertising sucks, but when you have a kid going to college in less than a year and there's an opportunity to help pay for that with advertising, you'd be surprised how quickly that aversion you've harbored for years becomes surprisingly less important.
Google AdSense is a complete joke and colossal waste of time and space, so I have begun working with Federated Media (mostly because my friend Xeni is involved with the company and I trust her, but also because it's almost like "Federation" which invokes a Pavlovian response from my Star Trek brain) and I'm trying it out for three to five months. The guys at FMP tell me that it takes about three months for the campaigns to hit their stride, and around that time I'll know if it's been worth it to me to sell out, as it were. I have no idea how well this will work; it could bring in a substantial amount of cash, or it could take up a bunch of space on my blog and end up being a big waste of time, but it seems silly to me to not even try.
To make this experience as minimally annoying as possible, Federated Media has asked me to run a survey so they can put ads on my site that are relevant to the people who read my blog. I am assured that this is anonymous (unless you choose to include contact information, which I assume nobody in their right mind would do) and only takes a couple of minutes. If you've derived anything of value from my blog, it would be really cool if you took the survey. If you're disgusted by this entire thing, I completely understand, and I hope that this experiment won't turn you off from reading my blog in the future.
As I said last time: If this works, the end result should be good for me and my family, and presumably good for people who enjoy it when I write frequently in my blog, because if my blog is helping to support my family, I can justify writing in it more and more. I'll be able to work harder to write quality stuff, and that should be good for everyone.
If you don't want to see ads, try using Firefox + Adblock + filterset.g. Of course, I'd appreciate it if you'd whitelist me, because that lets me charge higher rates for fewer ads, but I totally understand if you don't want to.