A couple of days ago, I placed an ad for Old Schoolhouse Magazine in the advertisements on the left side of the page. Today, a woman by the name of Kath informed me by email that the magazine supports harsh discipline practices that are not at all in line with attachment parenting concepts.

So I removed the ad.

This would be a good time to talk about the ads here. If you are interested in why we have them, how they are picked, and how you can help please read this whole article.

Why have ads at all?

We have ads on the site because we hope we can recover some of the costs that have gone into it. The truth is, we don't really have room in our budget for this site... but we believe in it... so we are hoping we can get it to the point where it pays for itself. We'll have to grow a lot larger than our current base of 175 or so users before we reach that goal though. We'll probably need 5,000 or so.

How much are we paid for placing these ads?

The ads here are all affiliate ads. We aren't paid anything at all for placing them. In most cases (the current exception is the Google at the top of the page) we don't get paid for clicks on them. We only get paid if someone clicks through one of our ads and makes a purchase. Guess how often that happens?

Right. Not too often.

Maybe it will happen a bit more often if we display better ads though.

How can you help pick better ads?

First, like Kath, you can help me get rid of bad ones! We certainly have no intention of advertising anything here which is directly opposed to the very concepts and practices we are all trying to advocate. If you see an ad here that you don't think is appropriate, just let me know (and let me know why.) Chances are I'll remove it first and ask questions later. :-)

You can help another way too. If you have a company or product that you have personal experience with and you think an ad for it would be well-received here, please let me know! There's no guarantee that we'll be able to arrange an affiliate relationship with the company in question, but we'll look into it if it seems like a good fit.