The day I saw a McDonald’s ad on my blog was the day I decided never to run ads again, unless I had control over who advertised.

WordPress offers its bloggers a feature called WordAds, which allows fairly discreet ads to run on blogs. Bloggers get paid when they reach a certain rather high threshold of views.

Being that maintaining a blog takes time and I don’t get paid for it, I liked the idea of making a little money from it. Every time I checked, the advertisers were companies and activities I was okay with. I got comfortable enough with this that sometimes I turned off the ad view — the ads still ran, I just didn’t see them (you can do that for all WordPress viewers, including yourself).

I’ve always thought ads are a distraction on any website, to be honest. I can’t ever remember clicking an ad on a website. I’ve learned to filter them out of conscious awareness.

What a shock to see that McDonald’s ad on my blog! That company is just about as opposite as possible from what this blog stands for.

So I quit. Immediately. I hope you like this decision. By the way, I “earned” $85 from running WordAds, but they only pay after you reach $100, so I won’t be making anything from having run ads. 😦

My only income from this blog is through Amazon Associates. If you ever click product links (for books, DVDs, supplements, body care tools, and so on) on my blog posts, they will take you to Amazon.com, where you can purchase the item (or anything else). I get a small percentage of the sale.

I’ve earned less than $200 spread out over maybe three years since I’ve been an Amazon affiliate, so it’s not much, but still, any little bit helps. I especially appreciate knowing that many readers have bought books and DVDs I recommended, and that others have entered Amazon from this blog and gone on to purchase things like $900 keyboard. I made $35 from that sale!

If you like this blog and need to purchase something on Amazon, if you click a link like this to enter Amazon, any purchase you  make will help support this blog, at no extra cost to you. That would be very kind of you.

If WordPress offers me a way to select which ads run on my site (and/or which companies I would never allow to advertise, like McDonald’s and Monsanto), I might consider it again.

Meanwhile, I am going to examine setting up an Amazon store.