A few months back I made the decision to start displaying ads on this site.  I'm sitting here thinking about removing them for a few reasons.

I was looking through my server logs and notices that my DIY Aquarium Canopy page was pulling in a couple thousand unique visitors every month. When I casually mentioned this this a co-worker he mentioned that I should put ads on here and start making some money (like it was just that easy.) Well, I thought about it for a couple weeks and decided to add an advertisement to that one page. A month or so after that I decided to redesign my entire site and place ads on every page.  Because if one ad was going to be good, one on every page would be better.

Well, 6 months later and I still don't like the ads on my site. Actually, I HATE ads on ANY site, but especially my own. Those "flyover" ads are the worst in my opinion, they cover the entire window and you have to hunt for the close button.  These little banners here are the only type of ads I will put up, they are still intrusive because of styling and design differences with the surrounding pages, but they are contained in their own little boxes and should never bouce around your screen.  

How much do I hate ads?  Well, I had to turn off the AdBlock extension in both Chrome and Firefox when I put the ads on here just so I could test.  I had been using AdBlock since it was first released as a FireFox filter and I couldn't understand why everyone else didn't.

I have considered going back and removing the ads from my site, but I have resisted thus far. As of right now Google owes me approximately $20 for the 6 months I have been serving their ads (about 25 clicks) and I am a sucker for money. Besides, I may start posting somethng interesting or controversial on here and actually start pulling in some real traffic, then maybe some people will click on my ads.