Looking around the site you might have noticed that suddenly there are ads showing up on TWJ and if you’ve been reading the site for a while you might wonder why. Well, there are five main reasons.
- When TWJ was smaller I could use a small cheap host who cost me about $10 / month for their “unlimited” package which turned out to not be unlimited. Now that the site is getting visited millions of times a year I’ve had to get a more professional host and those are expensive.
- As the email list has grown so has the monthly fee to maintain the growing list.
- I was hoping the donation buttons and lack of ads would spur people on to make even $1 monthly donations, but very few have. What I get from that doesn’t even cover the email hosting.
- Whisk(e)y keeps getting more expensive not less. If I’m going to keep it going then I need the site to help fund itself a bit.
- There are upgrades to the site I want to make (premium plug-ins, some custom coding, etc.) all of which are not exactly cheap and as I mentioned above the monthly donations don’t even cover email hosting let alone help me pay for upgrades.
So there you have it. I was presented with two courses of action. Significantly scale back or close the blog due to the financial burden or find a way for the site to start making money and push ahead with making it better and continuing TWJ.
If for some reason seeing ads, so I can literally pay the bills, makes you mad, I’m sorry to loose you as a reader, but you know what they say. Nothing in life is free and that goes doubly for hosting fees and whiskey.
Cheers!
I doubt you’ll loose any readers who are donors! If you are reading regularly and not contributing, SHAME on you.
Thanks Chris… seriously :) Cheers!
No worries, Josh. Keep the reviews coming!
Thanks Ryan!
Thanks JB, much appreciated. Cheers!
Good for you Josh! I really enjoy your reviews and totally understand having to do that.
Thanks Tony :) Cheers!
I’m happy to put up with a few ads. Hope you can keep up the good work educating us whiskey lovers.
Thanks JohnT, really appreciate that :)
I agree with Tony; the ads are not an issue, and will give you the resources to continue with your awesome reviews. Maybe the mail order brides will bring a bottle with them……..
Haha, if they do I might click on it myself :P Thanks Eric!
Josh, I am not bothered by ads and hope they are enough to keep you flush with Whiskey and reviews flowing like the amber joy.
Do you have any say in what ads are shown? I LMFAO yesterday when I saw an ad for what were essentially Chinese mail order brides.
Thanks again.
Thanks Tony :) I don’t have any input, it’s a programmatic exchange, so it’s going to be interesting to see what comes up :)
Cheers mans!