Why This is an Ad-Free Blog

"I met a man who advises companies on how to be more efficient. He asked me what steps I had taken to ‘monetise my brand.’ I should have told him that a ladies’ brand is her own affair, but instead I explained that monetise is not a word and that there is more to life than the bottom line. He didn’t speak to me again – hooray."

(Jeanette Winterson)

When I click on to the option to "customize" my blog, I have four tabbed options. Posting, Settings, Layout (so far, so useful...) and Monetise. I do not wish to monetise my blog. Had I not read Jeannette Winterson's comments on the term in one of her columns last year, I would not even have recognised the word. Yet now everyone who sets up a blog with blogger is being encouraged to "monetise" . This means that if you sign up for this option, Google shows targetted ads based on your blog's content and you earn money when visitors view or click on these ads. (As a googlemail user, I'm unfortunately familiar with how this targeting works in practice. For example, I get an email from a friend that mentions fat activism and an ad appears alongside my inbox encouraging me to find out the "5 tips to get rid of belly fat".)

I first became aware of the explicitly ad-free blog movement whilst reading The Wish Jar, blog of author and guerilla artist Keri Smith. She sets her blog as a clear space that advertising cannot inhabit, and designed a logo to express this. This is where my owl ad-free blog logo comes from, and you can find more about what it means, and read Keri Smith's FAQ on why it matters to her, and download it for your own use by clicking here.

I manage to avoid a lot of advertising in my day to day life. I don't have a TV, and I have a clever application called Add-Art installed on my computer that replaces almost all the ads I would see online with pieces of art, and I rarely read magazines. A quick search online suggests that the average person in the western world is exposed to anywhere between 200 and 3000 adverts a day. Whilst I see adverts on billboards, and when I read the Saturday paper, I'm by no means bombarded with them to that extent. And I don't miss them, these adverts. And I certainly don't want to subject readers of my blog to them.

Welcome to a small ad-free pocket of the internet.