SaveYourself.ca is now mostly ad-free: good riddance to advertisements for products and services that I criticize

Google ads (AdSense) have been removed from SaveYourself.ca. (Some private ads remain.) They have been a blessing and a curse for the last three years. On the one hand, they generated just enough revenue to inspire me back in the days when tutorial sales could barely pay the server fees.

On the other hand, they’re a blight! Not just ugly and cluttery — which is bad enough — but routinely displaying ads for products and services that are diametrically at odds with the articles they’re decorating.

This is a fundamental weakness of AdSense ads: they backfire when you’re content is critical of something. Google matches their ads to keywords in your content, but Google’s big ol’ digital brain can’t tell the difference between:

Scientology is better than puppies and rainbows.

And …

Scientology is a steaming pile of wishful thinking only a weak-minded fool could fall for.

Criticize Scientology on a web page, and Google will cheerfully give you ads promoting Scientology. Yuck! Write an article about what nonsense intelligent design is … and get ads for organizations promoting intelligent design. Write an article about moon-landing conspiracy crap … and get ads from moon-landing conspiracy theorists.

Or, in my case, criticize upper cervical chiropractic (NUCCA) … and get ads for NUCCA practitioners. Sigh. Epic advertising relevance fail.

I just couldn’t live with that any longer. The mental dissonance was jarring. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

You can block individual advertisers, but it’s hopeless in my case: I would need to block 98% of the advertisers, and there would always be more. Also, without ads from chiropractors, there would hardly be any other ads!

How much money did I make from AdSense? Oh, never much: about $20–25 per week — not enough to get hung up on it.

In theory, the long term value of clean, uncluttered content will drive e-book sales and replace the advertising revenue. Crossing fingers.