Thank you for visiting this site. This is a campaign aimed at you the reader, to ask you to support the work of your favorite content creators by responding to interesting ads on their site.

A Manifesto of Support

Thousands of tireless content creators upload interesting content to their sites day after day. It costs them to do it. It costs money to host the site; it costs them time to keep it running smoothly; it costs them energy to create new content; and it costs them frustration to weed out the endless comment spam and placate the trolls.

Almost none of them are in it for the money. Most are passionate about their topic and endlessly willing to help others. It is no exaggeration to say they are the heros of the information age, responsible for making the internet the largest accumulation of human knowledge in history. If you benefit from using the internet it is probably in large part because of their efforts.

Many content creators use advertising to offset some of their costs. Despite this some readers criticize sites for using advertising, no matter how discrete.

One. Unobtrusive advertising needs no apology.

Click-through rates on content sites suck. Even some of the most popular blogs in the world earn only a few hundred dollars a year. Readers who keenly devour the content seem to be completely unwilling to support it.

Think about your favorite blog or website for a moment. If you met the author of that site in a coffee shop tomorrow, would you be willing to buy them a coffee? I know would. I would be more than willing to spend $3 on a coffee so I could tell them how much I appreciate their work.

It costs you nothing to honor a content creator by supporting their advertisers. But statistically you are much less likely to support the advertisers on your favorite sites.

Two. Support the advertisers who support good content.

Advertising networks don't allow you to ask readers to support your ads, and for a very good reason. Clicking on random ads benefits nobody: the advertisers stop advertising and the content creator ends up with nothing.

But if you love a site, you're bound to find adverts that are interesting. If you enjoy reading a blog about Vintage Cars, for example, you are sure to be interested in at least one ad on the site.

If you click on only the ads you want to see, then those ads get to be more prominent. You get to see some stuff you are genuinely interested in and the advertiser continues to advertise, bringing more support for the content creator. Everybody wins.

Three. Click only on ads you are interested in.

Charlatans and get-rich-quick-schemers are out to trick you. They disguise their ads as search-results or as content to get you to click on them. Or their whole content is filled with links that don't tell you they are advertising, but are. Or they provide you with content that looked good on the search engine, but ended up badly written and inaccurate. There are whole software packages available that automatically write garbage webpages stuffed with keywords to lure in unsuspecting surfers.

In an effort to get to something useful, many surfers click the ads they provide. This rewards the charlatans and makes it more difficult to find good content that is worth supporting. It is a sad fact of life that the better the content, the less often visitors click on an ad.

Don't let the dishonest guys get away with it.

Four. Support only those sites that give you value.

Thank you for reading this site. Now head to your favorite site and support their hard work.