I have no idea why ads for cinnamon rolls and other stuff are appearing between the first and second posts on this page. (Well, better cinnamon rolls than Scientology!)
I have neither enabled AdSense nor requested any other form of advertisement on this website. I’ve asked the WordPress people to investigate.
UPDATE: And here’s the answer I received from the WordPress “happiness engineer” (does anybody really use that as their job description?):
Hi Jerry,
To support the service (and keep free features free), we do sometimes run advertisements. We’ve tested a lot of different ad providers and currently use Google AdSense and Skimlinks. We try hard to make the ads discreet and effective and only run them in limited places. If you would like to completely eliminate ads from appearing on your blog, we offer the No-Ads Upgrade: http://support.wordpress.com/no-ads/
Full details on advertising:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/
Best,
Brad | Happiness Engineer |
Well, that sucks. I haven’t had ads before (except in an ill-advised experiment when I tried running them and they all turned out to be religious), and now they start appearing. And they’ll make me pay to eliminate them. So they make money coming and going, regardless of the money I pay them for the website and upgrades.
Well, block them if you can. I hate them.
I thought it was a new feature you were starting:
Cinnamon as an Art Form: A Study of the Breakfast Club
I don’t see ads here in the UK
“I have no idea why ads for cinnamon rolls and other stuff are appearing between the first and second posts on this page.”
It’s because you’re not viewing with Firefox and Adblock Plus.
+12 Totally awesome combination. If you’re at a site that you like and it relies on ads, you can disable ABP otherwise the web is (almost) clear of ads.
To support the service (and keep free features free), we sometimes run advertisements. We try hard to only run them in limited places. If you would like to completely eliminate ads from appearing on your blog, we offer the No-Ads Upgrade.
Source: http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/
The link indicates that logged-in readers should not see ads. But I’m seeing them, whether I’m logged in at WEIT or my blog, so they’ve either changed policy, or something’s gone awry.
Now that you’ve mentioned scientology, expect one of their one hour advertisements to come up.
No ads here…. over at FTB I get specifically Canadian ads, while others seem to see different ads… maybe they are tailored to where you are?
Maybe it’s a sign from God that you should join Freethought Blogs!
Maybe if PZ started Freethought Websites he’d join?
Can it be that we are all sinner men?
They have ads too. And Coyne hates those even more.
Oh good god, no.
It’s picking up the pake algorithms.
I was surprised when I saw the ad yesterday, since I have adblock on.
…and today as well.
I can’t see any ads here in the UK and was wondering what the fuss was about.
As for adblock, until someone finds a foolproof way of distinguishing an ad from other content, programs like that can’t be 100% effective.
Well they’re pretty effective, I never see any ads at all, and I’m online a lot.
Ads don’t really bother me unless they move, so I don’t have AdBlock installed; I use Firefox with FlashBlock and NoScript. FlashBlock documentation recommends not using it with NoScript, but I’m not really sure why. Some people who’ve used computers I’ve set up find it annoying to enable Java for certain sites, but it’s not a big deal.
OK, I get it. Only true Jerry groupies can see the Cinnamon rolls!
For the rest of us it is just cheese.
Hmm, now there’s an ad appearing directly below/part of this post. And it’s not for tasty treats, it’s for some home improvement thing. It could still be worse. Not that I know how these things work, but if we just keep saying the word pake, will we get advertisements for local purveyors of pake? I hope so, because pake makes everything better, even annoying ads. Pake.
I never see ads here, even though I do not use AdBlock (as far as I know).
As I recall, WordPress puts ads on your site when it gets popular, so evidently you’re one of the more popular sites-posting-articles-using-the-Wordpress-platform.
I feel cheated – where are my ads!
Does Brad have an B.S. in H.E.? He seems more like an Unhappiness Engineer, really.
Bill Hicks on marketers. (hopefully this won’t embed, I apologize in advance if it does-am trying without the http-colon-slashes at beginning)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVZo1Jjfshw
…interesting. If you leave off the http:// at the beginning, it indeed does not embed, but it adds http:// to the appearance of the link. Weird.
oh – I forgot. Not even remotely safe for work or Sunday school.
Pharyngula is often littered with religious ads. How ironic.
The glorious content overwhelms any annoyance I might experience at the ads. I don’t even notice them.
They’re just billboards in the highway: I tune em out. Unless they’re for The Rapture … then I have plans to make.
No ads here. Neither on my Mac nor my PC.
As someone working in IT administration, I sort of have a mixed feeling about this. Ads can be annoying, but the cost of modern server farms is astronomical. Websites that get hundreds of thousands or millions of hits consume a large amount of resources and require plenty of top line equipment. This stuff does not come cheap.
Given that many of these user self service blogs are given at close to free, I’m not at all surprised to see some attempt at balancing the books.
As to the potential presence of religious ads, as an atheist I don’t get offended, I get a chuckle out of the situation.
I saw nothing with my AdBlock Plus on.
I turned it off to check, and some absurd “Soul Jam” advertisement video appeared (no idea what it’s selling).
AdBlock is back on, and annoying ads are gone. Happiness.
It is good to see the experts finally identify this “website” as a blog!
We have been wondering.
You can host a wordpress install on your own server (I use DreamHost ends up being less than $10/month) – WordPress is still free, but it requires a bit more management. The benefit being complete control. I can advise if you’d like.
I’m actually a little upset that I don’t see cinnamon rolls… I love cinnamon rolls.
I don’t see any ads, with or without AdBlock Plus. And I am not logged in either. I guess I am too late for all the fun…
Everyone should get the extension AdBlock (I have it for Chrome, not sure if it exists for Firefox or others). It blocks ads, of course, but it also blocks the commercials at the beginning of YouTube videos!
If that’s not an option, then AdBlock Plus (which is a completely different extension) is available for most browsers. I don’t think it handles YouTube commercials, but it still blocks webpage ads.
Adblock Plus does that too (at least on Firefox). In fact, the last time I used chrome adblock, I found it to be rather weak in comparison to Adblock Plus (which, given their names makes a lot of sense :).
it doesn’t bother me one bit…in fact i never noticed them until they were pointed out lol
Have you thought of moving to Freethought Blogs… I mean, why not?
While FTB is growing on me, I rather like seeing WEIT as “independent.”
I am with Jay on this. Why should web hosting be free? It is a service which requires expensive equipment and support staff who will want their pay cheques at the end of the month. If someone offered me a completely free and ad-free hosting service I’d be suspicious: how could they possibly do this? By selling my personal data, perhaps?
How about “ad-free” instead of just “free”?
If you need money, why won’t you set up a PayPal account and place a brief message on top of your website saying “To keep this site up and running we need an amount of $NNNNN by the end of this year. If we fail to raise this money, the site is going offline. Please donate.” It works miracles for Wikipedia, Infidels.org and many others, you know.
Arguing in favor of annoying ads is a bit like saying “to keep our prices down we need a tiny little bit of a slave labor”.
Once I realized these ads were not part of Jerry’s posts (which was right away), I found them entirely easy to ignore.
I’d much rather skip over ads than feel guilty about whether or not I’m personally supporting every site I visit.
Ads are actually a great way of letting businesses pay for the content we like to get.
I draw the line at pop-ups & auto-start vids/animations, etc., tho.
If I understand Jerry’s post correctly, he actually pays for the web hosting and upgrades. Obviously, WP realized that since Jerry’s page took ground, it would be a torturous experience to move it someplace else, so they decided to capitalize on that by extorting some more money from Jerry. Well, screw them and get AdBlock Plus if you still don’t have one.
Force-feeding visitors with annoying ads is actually the second least ethical method to make money after email spamming. Consequently, AdBlock Plus is the second most useful weapon of self-defence after spam filters.
There is no way I am supporting anybody by agreeing to see their ads. If they want money from me, all they have to do is to ask for a donation.
No ads in my screen in México (didn’t read all the comments)…
AdBlock Plus is available for Firefox and Chrome, AdBlock for Safari. If you still get ads after installing them, download the Ghostery extension which eliminates the – um – “bugs” advertisers plant along with the ads in order to track you. All are free.
No ads here either. Alberta, Canada.