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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 1316264" data-attributes="member: 2013">It's only anecdotal, I suppose, but I personally have completely "tuned out" banner ads... literally, I do not cognitively acknowledge their existence... they are filtered by my brain as I scan the page for text, not images.  It took, oh, about 2 months after they were introduced for me to do this (my theory being that if I really *needed/wanted* your product, I'd already be googling for it so I won't waste time or brainspace with banner ads).  Thus for me, I don't EVER make a "click or not click" decision - there's no decision tree... I just hop merrily along completely ignoring banner ads.And of course, half the time I'm surfing in Mozilla with popups and images turned off anyway. :/Again, it's anecdotal evidence, but I've always run my PDF publishing with the theory, "I'm going to act as though I were my own customer."  Since banner ads are completely ineffective on me as a customer, I reject them as a publisher.  Similarly, placing ads for my "other books" in the last couple of pages of my current book annoys me as a customer, so I never do it as a publisher (in fact, I often make it a point NOT to buy things advertised in such a way, even if I had been planning on buying the book before I saw the ad - on the theory that when I buy a book, I'm paying for the BOOK and I don't want the ads... and yes, I use Acrobat to excise ad pages in PDFs I buy so I never see them again, too).Is this the "best" model for the bottom-line, business-wise?  Maybe not.  But I'm going to run my business the way I feel is "right" and if that costs me a little profit, well, so be it.  At least I can look myself in the mirror and not say, "hypocrite, you do as a businessman what you hate as a consumer."  I'm NOT saying that anyone here is doing that, by the way, I'm just saying there are certain things that I personally just don't do as a businessman because I get rubbed the wrong way by them as a consumer.  It's an obsessive-compulsive thing, if you believe my wife. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Not sure why I contributed all that, just the comment about making a decision on a banner ad sparked it.  I made my decision on banner ads about 2 months after they first appeared - "they're a waste of bandwidth and they annoy me, so I'm ALWAYS going to ignore them."  I understand why people say that "banner revenue supports {insert site here}" but my philosophy is, "think of your webpage as though it were your phone line or your P.O. Box - it's a business expense for communicating with your customers, and you should treat it as a utility expense, not as a source of revenue."  In other words, expect to PAY to have a webpage, not to make money for having a webpage in the same way you expect to pay to have a phone line, not to make money just for having a phone line.  It's the "stuff you're selling" - which does NOT include ads - that will "bring in revenue" (again, using the phone line analogy).  Bad business?  Maybe.  But I for one basically ignore pretty much anything online any more that's not text.--The Sigil</blockquote>

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