For the record, as of a few minutes ago, my blog, my Jewish holidays event scheduling page, and my comics aggregator are ad-free.
The ads Google was inserting were incredibly excessive and intrusive, something which has ramped up gradually over the years I’ve been running ads. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten, because I use an ad-blocker so I wasn’t seeing the ads.
While the negative and intrusive experience foisted on my readers and web app users is what pushed me over the edge and prompted me to turn off the ads, I actually should have done it long ago. I know adtech is a scam. I know advertisers use ads to scam people. I know hackers use ads to get malware onto people’s computers. I should not have been facilitating all that by running ads on my sites. I wasn’t living up to my values, and I’m trying to do better.
Having said all that, I want to remind those of you who use my comics aggregator that it took me hundreds of hours to build and takes time and money on an ongoing basis to maintain. If you enjoy being able to read all your comics in one place, ad-free, then please consider financially supporting the work. You can make recurring contributions via Liberapay or Patreon, or one-time contributions via Paypal or Venmo. It is sufficiently irksome to me that so many people are using the aggregator without helping to support it that at some point I’m probably going to get annoyed enough to stop letting anybody who hasn’t contributed use it.
