At the beginning of 2019 I mentioned wanting to take The ADHD Homestead ad-free. Since then I’ve done a lot of thinking about how ads fit into my business, both financially and philosophically.
And I’ve concluded that they don’t.
It’s easy for bloggers to think we should or even have to include ads. We don’t. Like any other business, we get to decide what we want the mission and ethics of our blogging platform to look like. For several reasons, some too complex to get into in this post, I didn’t feel right continuing to host ads on The ADHD Homestead.
I don’t see enough bloggers talking publicly about these kinds of decisions. We should. Our words impact people’s real lives. We owe it to our readers to be intentional and transparent about how we monetize our content.
Ads reward bloggers for the wrong reasons.
Ad revenue is a slippery slope. It rewards us for attracting attention. A post with a catchy headline and engaging content might well add value to its readers’ lives. However, that value doesn’t make the author any extra money. More eyes on the page do.
What’s more, the blogosphere (to use an ironically antiquated term) has no governing body. No ethical standards. No regulations1. A business built on ad revenue is a business built on virality. It’s also a business that tacitly endorses commodification of readers’ personal data.
That’s not the kind of business I want to run. I want to monetize my content in a way that requires quality and integrity rather than making it optional.
My dislike for ads had already made the decision for me.
Despite setting a goal to pull the plug on ads by the end of 2019, I never developed a strategy to make it happen. I also didn’t need one. My 2019 budget expected less than 4 percent of total revenues to come from ads.
I’m sure I could generate a lot more ad income if I wanted to. My heart has just never been in it. My Full Disclosure Policy, which I treat like a contract with my readers, puts strict limits on ad placement. I also banned ad categories like online gambling that I thought might harm my readers.
In other words, I sidelined ad content to the point where it barely impacted my bottom line. I didn’t need to fret over pulling it out.
Patreon didn’t give me the alternative I wanted, either.
Many content creators have turned to Patreon as a way to stay indie. 20-something, childless me would’ve loved it. The sneak peeks! The exclusive content! The intimacy with my audience!
I reserve the right to change my tune about Patreon but for now it feels like an unnecessary distraction.
Over the past couple years I’ve created two big projects outside the blog:
- Order From Chaos, a full-length book. The ebook has done well since its release in May 2018 and the oft-requested paperback comes out next month.
- The Do The Thing app, which sprang out of Order From Chaos and my blog content. The iOS version is currently in beta.
I expect both to be long-term income generators. Both also required a lot of solitary, head-down work. While I share snippets about my process in my email newsletters, I do that on my terms. My big projects are my priority and the first place I want to spend my limited work time.
I worry that Patreon would require too much bandwidth. Certainly I would have to cut back on something, somewhere, to provide regular content to subscribers. I’m not willing to make that tradeoff.
Why not just ask?
Every time I considered Patreon for The ADHD Homestead, it felt like a gimmick. I want readers to support my existing content. I don’t need to justify that ask by wrapping it in something else.
Instead, I want to give my readers the opportunity to contribute as they feel able and inspired to. My blog content is 100 percent free and I intend to keep it that way. Some readers whose lives I’ve touched haven’t been in a position to pay. However, I’m sure some have been — and they would have chosen to if I’d asked.
Enter tinyCoffee.
This week I finally sat down and removed all ad blocks from The ADHD Homestead’s sidebar2. In their place is tinyCoffee, a WordPress plugin that allows site visitors to “buy the author a coffee.” Contributions sent via tinyCoffee go directly to my business PayPal account. It’s a simple and straightforward solution that aligns more closely with my values as a creator.
We’ll see how this goes.
I do worry about tinyCoffee’s once-and-done nature. A reader sees it in the sidebar, clicks “buy the author a coffee,” and feels they’ve done their part to support quality indie content. Regular returning readers would always generate more ad revenue but may not feel inspired to make repeated intentional contributions.
Despite what I said before, I may start a zero-frills Patreon offering very low support tiers for people who want to support the blog with no strings attached — for either of us. A friend does this for their podcast and while it’s not a ton of money, it’s more than I ever made from my intentionally-low-visibility ads.
I want to see where this journey takes me. For me, “indie” means I own my content/product and my mission — and I decide how to make that product profitable. Simply making money from my work doesn’t feel good enough. I want to make money from the right work, for the right reasons. Killing ads feels like a big step in the right direction.
1
The FTC did release an FAQ to clarify how their endorsement and testimonial guidelines apply to blog, social media, podcast, and video content. However, this only addresses material relationships between influencers and their advertisers and sponsors. It does not begin to tackle the issue of self-styled experts peddling misinformation and making thousands of dollars a month on clickbait.
2
I did keep the Amazon search widget and an affiliate link to Order From Chaos, but both of those make their intentions clear. What I’m really concerned about are ad blocks that use readers’ personal data to serve up targeted ads.
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