|
Please read this - the future of sites like this may depend on you knowing how the internet works.
Everyone seems to think that all the information, pictures, videos etc. on the internet is free. If you sit and think about it for a minute you will realise that people like us, who spent
a huge amount of time and effort putting information together, need to somehow pay for hosting services, website registration and put some money towards getting out and photographing
and filming new locations.
All of this costs us money and even though we are a non-profit site, there are some costs involved in making this available online so that you can come in and find some (hopefully)
useful and interesting information.
In order to cover some of our cost (we don't even come close to covering all of our costs) we place a few adverts on our site. We do not use pop-up adverts as we believe they
are very annoying and should be banned from the net. On most of our pages there are one or two adverts. They are not intrusive and if you are not interested in them you simply ignore
them.
Some people, less than 1% of our visitors, will find something in an advert that interests them and they will follow it to the source. When this happens we earn a few cents. The reason
this works is that we have a large number of people visiting our website and even though less than 1% will follow an advert, it is enough to help us and it doesn't cost our readers anything.
SO WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
The problem is that now some browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 block adverts by default. Even if you did want to see adverts, unless you know they have automatically
been blocked you have no choice.
I hear a number of people cheering at this point because, like most of us, they don't like being bombarded with adverts. Fair enough if the adverts are intrusive and on some sites
they are. What you have to ask yourself is what happens to sites like ours if all our adverts are automatically blocked and no one ever had the chance to check them out? The
answer is, eventually the cost of keeping this site going will become too much and everything here will be lost when it closes down.
Even totally ad-free sites like Wikipedia need funding and they ask readers directly for money. and that in effect, is also advertising.
Put simply, without advertising many valuable websites on the internet would cease to exist.
If you use Internet Explorer 10 or even use Adblock Plus on Firefox, we would ask you to consider turning ad-blocking off on sites like ours that take care not to become a big pain
with adverts. You never know, one day you may even see an advert that you are interested in, after all they are usually tailored to suit the subject a web page is talking about so they
may even turn out to be useful.
|
