What hucksters are on your page?

[David Terrenoire]

Besides you and your friends, that is.

I just noticed that the ads along the side of my page (if I click the "How others see it") are all about music: Study Blues Guitar, EZ Play Acoustic Guitars, Quit Sucking at Guitar (my personal favorite), Blues Ringtones (If you had a blues ringtone that would pretty much cancel out any blues cred you might possess, wouldn't it?), and Guitar Lesson Scams (I have to check that out).

So what's on your page?

[Stephen Blackmoore]

I have a surprising number of references to Dr. Seuss. I know why, I just find it disturbing.

From now on I will make sure that every blog and forum post I write has some reference to the Baby Jesus Butt Plug, ballgags, Semtex, nipple clamps, the Sybian, BME, CBT or Hello Kitty.

Just to see what happens.

[Bill Cameron]

I have Crime Scene Cleanup, some dating service from Cincinnati, and a link to a place where I think you can play naked volleyball.

[Stephen Blackmoore]

They have women in Maine?

[J.D. Rhoades]

Thanks to the Adblock extension for Firefox, my answer is "I have no idea and I like it that way."

[Jude Hardin]

What disturbs me are the ads on my page and the main page for known writing scams. I don't think companies who prey on unwary newbies belong on a site like this. I don't think they belong anywhere but perhaps in court. Anything we can do about this, Mr. Hatadi?

[Daniel Hatadi]

The Google ads are the reason the site's free. They are based entirely on the words on the page and neither Ning or I have control over them.

I could pay $20 a month to run my own ads, but I'd rather not get into that whole 'monetization' thing.

[Elizabeth Zelvin]

I don't see "How Others See It"--is that because I come in via Firefox? I do have "Ads by Goooooogle" down the side. The most interesting is an Amazon ad for a book about "sensuous love and mystery novel about women in the Bible." The rest are a vanity press ("don't bother with an agent--global distribution in 30 days"), AbeBooks, and mysterybookclub.com. Sounds like I'm relatively lucky. :)

[Jude Hardin]

Well, there are over 200 members here already. For $.12 a year each, we could do away with the ads altogether? I'm in. :)

I hate the friggin' things.

[Daniel Hatadi]

I strongly suggest to look into Dusty's solution of Firefox with Adblock Pro (both free).

They'll protect you from ads on EVERY site.

[Jude Hardin]

Cool. Thanks Dusty and Daniel.

[Karen from AustCrime]

A Cowboy and Cowgirl dating service ... what on earth is that trying to tell me.

I know those things get up lots of people's noses but we use them (sigh).

In many free for the user projects (like our open source projects and our open / available databases) the click through payments from Google ads are the only money we make. That money allows us to pay for website hosting, bandwidth charges, some unavoidable software purchases that you sometimes need to make to keep the sites running, and all that other boring administrative stuff.

We try to off-set some of that on one of our projects by donating a % of the money to charity, but really, annoying as they may be, but they do help a lot of us bring xyz to you for your enjoyment :) and therefore provide a lot of services that we couldn't otherwise afford to provide.

[Lisa Richardson]

My ads are for ringtones and old cars, lol, but yikes, also something that says "pictures" of STD's? What the heck is that all about? And no, I'm not clicking to find out! But I am going to check out Adblock for sure.......