Hmmm.

That is a tough one. To be honest using Firefox I pretty much don't have to see any adds. I have ran them both on and off on this site and the little strip of links we currently have don't bother me. In fact, I have gone to some of those links and poked around a bit. What I can't stand are ads that I can't scroll past. In other words they eat up a portion of screen all the time. I paid to have my widescreen monitor and it makes me want to pitch a fit when I have to loose a bunch of viewing pixels because a website is built in such a way that you can't view a picture without an inch across the top/bottom/side of some ad. Browsers with a whole bunch of buttons bug me too. I only have the bare necessities.

I don't know how much it costs to run a site like this and since we stopped showing the donation bar it does sort of fall into the lost crevices of my mind. That really should be a bar that is reset each month based on what we have and need. Unless we want the site to actually generate some profit (nothing wrong with that)? A few non-eyeball busting advertisements wouldn't bother me but with that said...I would quickly disable anything that did bug me. I have to actually enable ads to run the way I have my browser set up now. If that is the same as everyone else then I'm not sure what revenue we can generate from even a plethora of ads because so few people see them.

Is it worth it compared to just having a monthly donation goal? If all I needed to do was kick in a small amount every month I would probably prefer that. At least right now when I have a few dollars in my pocket. If it meant I needed to donate a large chunk of dough then ads would have to be the way since I'm not daddy warbucks.

The appeal of this site is the tutorials, the artwork, the advice from the community and that is what we are selling to these advertisement companies because that is what creates the traffic. If I don't feel like I'm being pimped out to some jack-wagon pop up obnoxious inverted video image company I won't care.

We must remember that just like social networking sites, "if you aren't paying then you are not the customer, you are the product." It can't be done for free unfortunately.