I decided to add monetization to the blog, aka advertising or sponsorship to cover the cost of hosting, which has gone up significantly over the past few years due to inflation. While I enjoy doing the blog, it has become quite time consuming, and some of the tasks I don’t particularly enjoy such as updating and maintaining the PHP code that keeps things humming along. But paying nearly $200 a year to keep it humming along all on my own seemed like an expense, especially when a lot of people just visit to grab my maps. I enjoy blogging but I don’t like pouring money down the the endless and increasingly greedy hole of the web host.

I am playing around with the best forms for advertising — a compromise between ad revenue and keeping my blog’s organic format and explains who I am. Advertising is obnoxious and most of the products I wouldn’t personally buy, but it’s the advertisers first amendment right to have their message heard, and they’re paying to be seen. That said, I do like that ATV they’re trying to sell me and some of those big trucks. The solar crap, maybe not so much. But I won’t talk that much shit about my advertisers as their buying me beer.

That said, it’s not a lot of money, even with a somewhat aggressive ad placement — especially the one on the top left — I am still making less then $2 a day on advertising. But that’s enough to cover the hosting and have a few bucks left over when I get that hundred dollar check every few months. I don’t limit what ads can be run, so be careful what you click on. You’re an adult, you can figure out which ones you want and ones that will infect your Windows computer with a virus and spyware. That said, I already want to buy that ATV they’re advertising on my blog, maybe some day one when I own my land.

Ads will keep my blog strong, even if I don’t love them. But I do like the fact that I should be getting a small but steady revenue from the blog, and it will incentivize me to better keep content up to date, and develop new maps and concepts all of the time to keep people coming back to my blog. And maybe it will buy an occasional beer or some gasoline for my big jacked up truck.

Here is my Privacy Policy. I tried to keep it funny and real. Internet privacy is a joke, they’re tracking you even from your cellphone in your cabin up in the woods. That’s world we all live in. This is a work in progress, I will fill in more details are learn more from Google Ad Sense and continue to learn more how it applies to my blog.

Feel free to write me! And, especially thank you for your support. And Moo.