Ugh my blog has ads. I know, I know. Feel free to use an ad blocker. (I use AdGuard for Safari and uBlock Origin for Chrome.)

It turns out that hosting a blog is expensive. I started the blog on September and as of March I think I’ve finally made enough to pay for the fancy little ‘s‘ at the end of my ‘http.’ Not to mention what’s going to happen when my GoDaddy promotional rate expires… anyway, this is all very boring, but basically this exercise in narcissism has also become an exercise in paying for a lot of things I don’t really understand. So I’m sticking some (hopefully unobtrusive) ads on here so hopefully I’ll be able to keep this going once all of my super sweet intro rates to all of these confusing services expire.

To me, the lack of transparency regarding ads and sponsorships in the blog world is really obnoxious and sometimes really troubling. (Not, like, Syria-level troubling, but still.) There’s nothing more irritating than when a blogger says “I had the chance to try out Mr. Sniffles Peanut Butter for Cats® and here’s 500 words about totally weird things you can do with it that no sane person would ever do!” and then totally leave out the part where “had the chance to try” really means “was paid money to use and endorse.” Or when someone links to a cute “find of the day” that turns out to have 5,000 1-star reviews. So here is my policy on ads and recommendations:

1. Ads: Right now I have Amazon ads and the end of every post that attempt to recommend items based on my post keywords or something. If you click on one of those and end up buying anything from Amazon afterwards, they let me have some small percentage of that sale. I don’t have plans to branch out from that, but if I do I promise I will never have ads that interrupt the content or ads that link to dumb/scammy/weird stuff.

2. Links and recommendations: I use affiliate links when I link to stuff on Amazon and Etsy, This is the same deal as above–if you click on a link to a clock or a fan I bought and end up buying something from Amazon within some certain amount of time, I get a tiny percentage of that sale. I don’t really understand how that makes financial sense for Amazon, but I guess that’s their problem? I only use affiliate links for those two sites, because they’re where I do like 85% of my shopping. I only link to products I actually own, or things with solid reviews  (scanned by ReviewMeta, obvs) that I genuinely would buy.

3. Sponsorships: That’s, uh, not a problem for me right now.

So that’s how I’m approaching the weird and sometimes gross arena of blog financials. Hopefully the Amazon ads aren’t too annoying, and don’t worry–it’s not a precursor to “Find out how this mom made $9839483 a month working from her toilet”-type garbage in my sidebar. Now go install an ad blocker and forget about all of this boring stuff!