You are seeing this page, because my Blog Page has identified you as being an Adblocker user. Please take one minute out of your day to read this candid message.
Ad blockers are great tools, (in fact I use one myself for certain websites), however in the race to block large scale and aggressive corporate advertising and those annoying pop ups and trackers, the widespread use of Ad blockers are now starting to hurt small privately owned websites and blogs – the millions of sites around the internet which are just like this one.
Let me explain….
This isn’t a corporate or business website, and your visit or click is certainly not funding a second home with a swimming pool for a CEO or new golf clubs and a new car for their Shareholders, it is simply a hobby blog which evolved simply from being a single page aimed at assisting strangers from all over the world with independent unbiased advice in relation to saving money off their ever increasing energy bills – passing on goodwill and advice on the type of things which saved me money on my own bills. The site is privately owned and paid for and I am the sole Author and owner of the website, it is not attached to any business, nor is its goal to make money, or even make a profit and I don’t sell any of the products appearing here, I don’t even work in retail!.
I don’t rely on the website or internet to generate a living or any kind of income, and that was never the intention as I already work full time. Over the last decade I have probably spent hundreds of hours of my free time during Evenings and Weekends writing articles, many of them containing thousands of words of advice as well as answering questions from the many visitors who have found the advice i’ve written to be informative and have been kind enough to take the time to leave a comment, and whilst I am happy to continue to volunteer this time entirely out of goodwill, I really shouldn’t be expected to be out of pocket in relation to the cost of conveying the information, and keeping it around for the future. Would you??
Is it really so unreasonable for bloggers like myself to at least cover our annual domain and monthly hosting costs by running a few discrete ad’s? are you really so selfish as to deny us that opportunity and the privilege to cover our relatively small expenses and overheads?. Seriously??.
On a website which isn’t a business and doesn’t have a shopfront selling actual goods, advertising is the ONLY available option of covering its costs – there are no other ways of producing the trickle of revenue which keeps it online, and available to you 24/7, and faceless Adblockers just make it even harder.
With the huge surge in the popularity of ad blockers over the last few years, this website is no longer covering its own costs and I am now funding it solely from my main employment, and that is diverting it away from my Family. This is not a unique or isolated problem either, many non commercial websites and personal blogs are facing the same problems, due to the fact that the popularity of ad blockers, have forced them from being self supporting to actually becoming a growing financial burden to their owners, so it is hardly surprising that many forums, blog sites and websites are either asking for donations or slowly falling by the wayside and being closed or abandoned as their costs become untenable.
I could of course appeal for sponsorship, but then I would be expected to write positive “Pollyanna” style reviews of the sponsors’ products, even if I didn’t find their products to be impressive or well made, and if there were better, cheaper products out there, then I would risk upsetting the Sponsor by promoting them over their own products, which would in turn then prevent you from being told about a cheaper product and that isn’t what this site is about, and there are no winners in that equation.
The internet is made up of millions of interesting blogs, websites and forums, addressing and discussing a wide and varied selection of subjects mostly run and authored as a hobby by individuals like myself – the type of websites that we all use at some point and take for granted in order to get help or to answer a question or address a problem that we have and it would be a shame if they all slowly vanished, leaving only the big corporations and businesses online – ironically the type of entities whose aggressive advertising you were using an Ad Blocker to block in the first place!.
It is pointless appealing to the common sense of the Ad blocking companies, as they are a Business. So it falls down to appealing to each individual ad blocker user, so please play a fair game with independent bloggers, and consider helping to support this site simply by adding electricheatingcosts.com to your ad blocker white list. The ad’s here are not intrusive and you only need to click them if you find them to be of interest.
