I really don’t like web ads. I especially hate ads that are irrelevant, ugly and distract a user from reading a site’s content. This is why since the beginning of my site’s existence, I’ve never added ads to my site.
It wasn’t until I saw Carbon Ads pop up on various dev and design blogs, where I thought wow, this is something different in the ad space. The ads are minimal, clean and aligns well with what I’m interested in. I’ve reached out to Carbon Ads in the past to see if I could have their ads on my own site. At the time I inquired my site’s metrics didn’t meet their requirements.
For a period, I thought I could just pump out more content to try and get the numbers up, but then I began to understand that my intentions were not good. My goal shouldn’t be to get numbers up and maintain them, but I should always strive to put out really good content, that I would be proud of and that I would want to read myself.
I’ve tried experimenting with my own tip jar to not much success. I’ve also noticed other devs and makers using services like Patreon and Ko-Fi these days to help support their work. While I’ve thought about setting up my own accounts, it was another service to sign up for and another service that at any point could go under and stop working or their agreement with their users could change based on their business needs. So I decided not to sign up for the services.
Instead, I’ve decided to have sponsors on my site that I run myself by building relationships with friends and other businesses. I’ve befriended many talented friends that are makers of all sorts of things such as books, icon sets and apps. In having sponsors, I’d like to use my site, to help provide a platform for such makers to reach an audience that they might otherwise not have access to.
In providing such an opportunity, my hope is to highlight some awesome products and services to my audience and give exposure to those who make them. My other hope is that by taking a small fee to sponsor on my site, that it would help offset some of the costs of the projects, products and things that I make for others and keep me motivated to keep making great stuff.
So if you’ve got a product or service that you’d like to share on this site as a sponsorship, head on over to the sponsorship page for more information.