Occasionally I see this banner on some blog I’ve stumbled upon. The owl’s cute and all but I can’t think of a more annoying and smug message to display on your site.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of ads. If you can run your site without them more power to you, but don’t fucking brag about it.

People that define themselves by what they don’t do rather than what they do just make my skin crawl. I had this same reaction to straight-edge kids in college. Oh, you don’t drink? That’s fascinating, what else do you not do? Do you also not steal or not commit mail fraud? Why don’t you get tattoos proclaiming that? Working from a deficit model like that just seems like such a backwards way to approach life.

Also again, I’m not crazy about ads but they are kind of a necessary evil. Do people not realize that the reason 90% of the websites they love and use everyday are free is because they have ads?

To paraphrase something Ricky Van Veen once said, if you want regularly produced high quality content you have to pick one of the following scenarios:

1. Free content, with ads.
2. Free content, with product placement.
3. Paid content.