It Has To Begin Somewhere...

It's the first day of Daylight Savings Time in March, 2012. I've spent most of a day going through all the various statistics dashboards of the elements that power and track activity on Sangres.com. This website is serving more than 2 million ads per month and for this month, that isn't going to make a return of $500. It's not worth it. Couple that with the massive proliferation of privacy-invading cookies and web beacons that come with that advertising... it's really not worth it. And I am a long-time Google-certified expert in this type of publishing and advertising. So I've decided it's high time I began cleaning up my little corner of the web.

I'm presently engaged in a massive rewrite of the entire site, updating all the code to html5, adding more jQuery functionality and adding the next higher level of handicapped accessibility (the site is already 99.9% accessible but there's always room for improvement). So as I continue about that code update, I'm beginning to dump the ad codes that call for ads from common ad-servers, ad servers like Google AdSense, Chitika, Infolinks and ContextWeb. This doesn't mean I'm killing all advertising on the site, only that I'm cutting off all the common ad-servers, the guys who pump your browsers full of tracking cookies and web beacons so that they can follow you everywhere and target ads specifically at you. I've had enough of that. It seems some advertisers have had enough, too.

My direct sales of my ad space is rising. As time goes on, more advertisers are banging on my door, asking about my traffic, my rates, my service. And more of them are investing their hard-earned dollars in me. I'm at the tipping point right now where my income from direct ad sales is making it possible for me to do this and not put my family through serious hardship as the income from this website is what has supported us for years. And our family has grown by one in the last year. The photo above is of my granddaughter and we now have full custody of her. So at 60 years old, I'm completely rebuilding a 4,000+ page website into state-of-the-art, fully accessible code and raising a second crop of kids. Wish me luck... neither of these things is an easy or fast-moving project but both offer immeasurable rewards.

If you would like to assist me in this effort and occupy some of that advertising space that I'm freeing up, please check out the sponsorship page. I don't need paid ads on even a quarter of the pages of this site to support our family. Some of my direct advertisers have been with me since 1998 and if I should forget to bill them once a year, they usually send me a check anyway... they like what they get for their money: it's not expensive and it does what they want done really well. It's time to take back the Internet so our children and grandchildren have something worth using.