Do you ever click on the Google ads on the answerMug pages?

I have Adblock. HA!!!

I don't get those ads
never seen one
but I never click on ads anyway.
have adblock
it doesn't make JA happy
because she makes a few cents when people click on them.
But like I said...I never click on that stuff

So far, its been hard but I have resisted. :)

with adblock- i typically whitelist sites that i regularly use (to support them) but this site is already clunky to use and the ads make it even worse. (i do feel bad for not supporting the site but the site would be even more unbearable for me to use without blocking the ads- its already difficult to use without the extra stuff flashing around on the screen)

I suppose that i can turn off my adblock once a day and than click on some ads to help support AM This post was edited by Skunky Stinkerson at February 9, 2017 3:02 AM MST

I do at times. Like already stated by others, to generate revenue for JA to maintain and develop this site. 

I have to admit, I saw this question and cringed because I'm accustomed to having to defend the presence of ads. You guys are awesome. 

I'm not saying we have a perfect system by any means, but I've intentionally blocked out popups and animated ads/ videos, though some of them do rotate through images. I've also banned just about any kind of spam ad I can think of- sexual/ dating ads, political ads, etc. And, if anyone reports an issue with an ad, be it something offensive for another reason or an ad that's misleading, I follow up and make sure it gets removed. I do explore other monetization opportunities when they arise. For example, we have Taboola, which is the content-based ads and we get a few cents per click on those. I also have the Recircle widget on some pages, which is similar, but that isn't a PPC (pay-per-click) model. It's kind of like a link-share. Because we promote content from other sites, AM appears in the widget on other sites as well. It brings us people, rather than money... I like that it's "home-grown," so to speak. The Google ads are probably the top payer, but they're mindful. They know if you just click on a page and then leave, and we don't get credit for the click. They also tell me I'm not allowed to encourage clicks or I get in trouble. :s So, I'm not sayin' nuthin'. Just explaining how they work.

The ads at the top of the page are totally different as well. That's more of a grass-roots thing, too. They come from an ad network that once catered only to people who wrote/ designed web comics and blogs. So, what we see there are mostly sole proprietors- individual people who run businesses from their homes, rather than large corporations. Lots of artsy and creative people. On those, clicks don't matter. We're registered in a bidding system and potential advertisers decide how much they're willing to pay for a day of placement. A lot of that depends on how many times the pages load, so even if you never ever click, as long as you aren't using an ad blocker, your presence alone can help increase the rate we earn. Personally, I do like those ones the most. I often check out the businesses listed, particularly when a blog of interest is being advertised.

We used to have mini games here, too, and if any of those are still around, I need to find them and remove them. That was another ad startup. It was one or two guys who set up mini games you could play free and they were ad-supported. So, we were supposed to be paid every time someone played a game... people really liked those ones- they didn't feel like ads at all, but the company folded rather quickly and we never got a payout on it. It was a really cool concept, though, and I had several conversations with the owner of the company. I hope he relaunches with improvements.

My ultimate goal is to eventually migrate into more of a sponsorship model with advertisers. i.e. A company sponsors an on-site event or contest and gets mentions on the site, etc. I may also eventually do sponsored groups as well. For example, if a travel company wanted press, they'd be able to pay a fee to sponsor a travel-related group for a period of time. They wouldn't have ads, but the company name would be listed as part of the group name and they'd get a mention on the group home page, and be able to interact and provide tips. I don't know if we have the traffic to support the sponsorship model yet, but when we do, I'll probably remove Taboola and Google altogether. I support the ideals of the other two companies, though, so I don't think I'd ever remove them altogether. 

Nope

I have a couple times in the past but doubt I will in the future. 

I've no objection to static ads that rent screen-space from the web-site, so the proprietor is paid irrespective of anyone following them. That's little different from the advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and if you don't find anything of interest in an ad, someone else will. Or you may be interested in what is being advertised but live in a different country so it's not personally helpful - for example, I am in England but AM and presumably its advertising clientele are in America. Either way the host site is still paid.

My beef is with advertising-agencies and major Internet companies who track your internet use in order to send you what they call "personalised content" [singular] - a concept as dreadful as those two words. That is the primary business aim of sites like Facebook, hence one reason I refuse to use it, the other being I simply do not need to use it! 


I wondered what those strange header cartoons were for. When I queried them a while ago, many other AM users appeared not to have seen them. They were not very amusing. The first showed a young woman pretending to be a "sabre-toothed squirrel" while her other half reckoned his magic dining-fork would protect his nuts from her. The more recent shows a girl suddenly rather shocked to find her dreamy female pal fancies her. There was no obvious point to the cartoons' contents, let alone existence. 

EP's advertisers used to track your location - they kept offering me dating-agencies eerily close geographically (though 100 mile radius is still a bit far for a blind date...). Since I regard dating-agencies as little better than fraudulent I do not touch them anyway, but they were clearly using my IP address to estimate my physical location hence geographically "personalise" the ad. Whether they had assessed my possible status and orientation from my EP uses I have no idea, but it's a creepy thought.


My ISP is BT Internet, and it has latched onto a neat but very irritating trick. When you open its home page it now offers an e-post filter with three settings, of which the default is "Stop-Nowt" (I forget its actual label). If you allow that it allows all manner of supposed features including rapid Facebook access (needless to me) and something that really means tracking for advertising-agencies. I set it to a narrower range to avoid those, and press "Save" but if it saves it at all, it does so for only that session, so when I turn the PC off it re-sets to Stop-Nowt. I assume they hope I'll give up and let it go... Tough! I won't! So there!

Here is a method you might want to consider. Ads presented as an optional page. Ad blockers do not apply.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/92468/get-wednesdays-top-amazon-bargains-now

I shop regularly at amazon.com, so maybe you can arrange some way to get a piece of the action. But I would just as soon send a cash contribution to keep it simple.