Why I don’t have ads here

Another “put this up so I can point to it later” post.

Now and then someone tells me that I should put ads on my blog. Some of the articles get a ridiculous number of search engine hits, and I could probably add another (small) income stream there.

I’m not morally opposed to the very idea of advertising-supported web sites or, indeed, advertising in general. I’m opposed to leaking information about my readers, however. And that’s what the advertisers actually pay for.

I don’t oppose sharing information, mind you. If I could easily customize this blog so you only saw what you wanted without hooking you into the government/corporate exploitation network, I would. (It can be done, mind you, but it’s not trivial, so it’s not worth my time.)

That’s why I let people send me money over at my online bookstore. I’d rather perform on a streetcorner with my hat in front of me than feed human flow data to anonymous information leeches.

Of course, that raises the question of “why don’t you have a tip jar link on every blog post?” I write this blog to remind me what I did and to promote my work. If you can make use of either, fine — but that’s incidental to my purposes. Rather like OpenBSD, actually.