It is no secret that many users hate Web pages filled with ads. Unfortunately those ads provide a valuable source of revenue for the sites providing you with “free” content. While we do place ads on our sites, we try to keep the user in mind so they aren’t as intrusive as many sites. To me there is nothing worse that video ads that automatically start playing and I have the settings on our site so that they should never appear.

Some users install ad-blocking software. I’ve tried it myself. I found the result was that more than ads got blocked and some of the worse ads still got through. As our sites do earn money from ads, I’ll ask those of you using ad-blockers to please modify your settings to allow the ads on our sites to display. This extra revenue is very important to us.

There is now another alternative to ad-blocking software that will decrease the number of ads you see while also compensating sites you enjoy (such as ours). Matt Cutts, a search engineer at Google, wrote a great post entitled Give Google Contributor a try. Give it a read as he does a great job of describing it all.

In short, you can make a monthly donation via Google Contributor and it will decrease the number of ads shown on sites using Google-owned ad technology. You can choose what displays in place of the ads. It could be a blank rectangle (see image below) or it could be a photo of your choice. According to their site, a $2 donation monthly will decrease ads 5-15%. Donating $5 monthly will decrease ads 15-25% and $10 monthly decreases ads 25-50%. Those donations are used to bid on ads so that sites are still compensated. In short, you are paying money indirectly to your favorite sites. I hope you’ll consider this instead of blocking ads on our site.