Hi!
While I was reading some comments this morning, I noticed that some truly odious advertisements had shown up on my blog, apparently uninvited. I’ve since learned that I can pay for the privilege of guaranteeing not to have this junk appear and have done so. This is mostly because I don’t want to run any advertising at all on my blog, even randomly and intermittently, but I absolutely do not want to direct any traffic to those loathsome, for-profit content thieves (and guess what was in the ad roster I saw today?), so I guess a little protection money isn’t the worst solution.
So if you ever see advertisements appear anywhere on my blog, could you please drop me a line at davidpwelsh at yahoo dot com? I’ll grudgingly upgrade, but I’ll be damned if I’ll upgrade with no good result.
Update: In response to a question, yes, according to the terms of service, “To support the service (and keep free features free), [WordPress] also sometimes run[s] advertisements.”
As I said, it’s important enough to me to eschew advertising to pay for the upgrade. Now, I have no problem with running advertising on a blog, but I just have no interest in doing so, largely because I don’t want to expend the effort necessary to keep advertisers I find objectionable off of my web presence. I dropped a line to WP support to let them know about the suspect advertisers on Google AdWords. The reply I received from one of their “Happiness Engineers” suggested I contact Google support to inform them as well, which I’ll probably do if I can ever figure out how.
I can’t find David Doub’s original article on this subject, but here’s Brigid Alverson’s link to the piece.