Desktop Linux Reviews

As you might have noticed, there are advertisements running on the site. I run these ads to earn income to pay for things like rent, health insurance, food, heat, car insurance and all of the other necessities. The ads also pay for the site’s bandwidth and hosting costs. I wanted to clarify a few things about the ads and the possible use of ad blockers by some of my readers.

Site Optimization
Before I talk about the ads, I wanted to let you know how I’ve tried to optimize this blog’s performance in your browser. I use the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin to speed up performance. The top and main content column should load almost instantaneously, while the bottom and sidebar load shortly thereafter. So you can begin reading content and the ads will just load in the background.

Here are some of the benefits and features the plugin offers:

Benefits:
At least 10x improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
“Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

Features:
Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers / clusters
Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
Caching of RSS (comments, page and site) feeds in memory or on disk
Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
Caching of database objects in memory
Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

I highly recommend using this plugin, it can make a really big difference in your site’s performance. I’ve done my absolute best to make sure this blog performs as well as possible while also being able to generate income to sustain itself and me financially.

Okay, now onto more information about the ads on this blog.

Different Kinds of Ads
On this site you’ll find CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) image ads and CPC (Cost Per Click) ads. You may also see an occasional interstitial ad, from time to time.

CPM Ads
I get paid per 1000 impressions for the CPM image ads. Each time an image ad loads in your browser, it counts as one impression. So, as you can imagine, it’s necessary to generate a lot of impressions to make enough money from the CPM ads to pay for the site’s costs and to pay me so I can pay my own bills.

CPM ad rates go up and down constantly each day and sometimes they can get quite low. So every ad impression counts and every ad impression is very important in helping keep the site (and me) afloat financially.

CPC Ads
The CPC ads (Google Adsense or Vibrant Media) pay me per click.

Google Adsense Ads
You’ll find one 300 x 250  ad in the sidebar just under the IDG Technology News feed, one 728 x 90 ad at the very top of the screen and one 468 x 60 ad toward the bottom of the main column (near the page navigation drop down menu).

These ads are context-sensitive and usually display products and services related to the text you are reading in one way or another. It is my hope that they provide some additional value to you as well as generating revenue for the site to continue operating.

I have adjusted my Google AdSense settings to try to filter out junk ads that aren’t related to this site’s content so hopefully you will find this advertising reasonable and perhaps even useful.

In-Text Ads: Not So Bad Once You Get Used to Them
These are the ads that appear when your cursor is placed over them in the article text. I know that some people truly detest these ads but I’ve found it quite easy to avoid them. Once you get used to seeing the links, you’ll be able to easily skip putting your cursor over them while enjoying the article you’re reading.

Ad Placement & Coloring
I hope you will notice that I have tried to be very careful about how ads are placed on this site. I have kept the image ads away from the actual article text. You will find image ads at the very top of the page, in the sidebar and at the bottom of the page after the article.

Text Ads Instead of Image Ads
You will not see image ads loading in the article text itself. Instead I’ve placed text ads in a color that fits in with theme of the site.

Why a different color? Because I don’t want to disturb you while you read. Keeping the text ads in a more subdued color means that you can see them but they don’t obnoxiously detract from your experience by constantly grating on your eyes. I have seen some sites make their text ads truly garish colors and I wanted to avoid that here.

The in-text ads default color is green, but I had that changed to black immediately after the ads went live on the site.

Search Results Page
Please note that if you do a search you will see Google text ads at the top and bottom of the search results page. Those text ads appear in Google’s default colors and they are also CPC (Cost Per Click) ads. Since there is no article text on the search results page, I have not changed the color.

I’ve taken great care to try to keep the articles easy on the eyes while also trying to reasonably monetize the site to cover my costs and pay my bills.

I hope that you will find the products and services that appear in the site’s ads to be useful and enjoyable.

Ad Blockers
Sad But True: Ads Pay the Bills
I know that some people really hate advertising on sites so they use ad blockers to filter out all of the ads. If you are one of those people I hope you will please consider turning off your ad blocker or white listing this site in it. As I noted above, it takes a lot of ad impressions to generate enough money to cover the site’s hosting and bandwidth costs, and to pay me so I can pay my own bills. So each time an ad is blocked, it really hurts the site (and me) financially.

Thanks so much if you have chosen to whitelist this site in your ad blocker! I really do appreciate it! You’re a good egg for helping to support the site financially. I hope the good karma you’ve created comes back to you many times over.

Cookie Blockers Instead of Ad Blockers?
If privacy is a concern for you, please consider using a cookie blocker or cookie manager instead of an ad blocker. Blocking cookies while still letting ads load in your browser is perfectly fine and does not affect the money I earn with the ads. There are numerous cookie management tools available for most browsers. So do a bit of Googling and I’m sure you can find a cookie manager that will work well for you.

Make a Donation
If you decide that you really don’t want to turn off your ad blocker then I humbly request that you consider making a donation to the blog by buying me a cup of coffee once per month. You can do so by clicking the coffee cup in the sidebar. It doesn’t need to be an expensive Starbucks cup of coffee either. I’ve always preferred the cheaper coffee to that stuff anyway. Heh.

Thanks!
I thank you in advance for understanding and I’m very glad to have you as a reader. Thanks so much.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.