This is something that someone actually asked me about on Twitter the other day. I responded there but I put more thoughts together.

If you look at this website, there are no advertisements. There’s no banners or pop ups or footers.

For those who don’t know, this is what it was like when you googled something around ten years ago: you got mostly Yahoo! Answers links but you also got independently run websites by real people and well cared for blogs. You got forums where regulars debated things amongst themselves. You got random bad advice such as the tip to put garlic up your vagina as birth control. You also got thoughts on philosophers and the mystical and long stories about tormented relationships.

In other words, you got real people and real stories. You got personalities. You search for information and you find that people, funny little people, are the things that contain and convey information.

For me, this is the beauty of the internet. I love the internet. I loved those geocities websites where all of the text was times new roman and neon. I loved their tiled backgrounds. I love them because these things mean that a real person made the website and worked hard on it.

The internet has changed. These days, if you google something, it’s mostly ads and promoted content. That’s what we call creative labor now, by the way—content. Most websites that run ads are better funded and sleeker than those old websites run by the odd hobbyist. A lot of them are serious publications and I have nothing against serious publications. It’s very tough running a serious publication online and I have a lot of respect for those who do it. When you run a serious publication and you have to employ a team of editors and writers, you usually have to run ads. There’s a handful of online publishers who don’t.

I actually don’t have a problem with ads most of the time when I surf the internet. I don’t find them annoying. A website giving you niche scanlations and translations of manga? Run those ads. Fund the website. A website that allows anyone to stream their favorite movies? Put those pop ups up! I’ll just close them. It’s really not a big deal. You have to fund the website and the labor involved in running a website somehow. Advertise that prostate medicine to me when I read Attack on Titan doujinshi. Whatever! Sure.

But I’ve never run ads. I get emails from advertisers everyday. I don’t know—I’ve never done it.

Would it even really be that much of a threat to my desire to write against capitalism? If I have an ad or two about that strange fruit doctors know about to lose weight and the herb that will lengthen your penis, does it really threaten my integrity? Is my integrity really that brittle?

I guess it is. I’m a bit arrogant. So, I don’t run ads. I’m trying to maintain a somewhat popular website on my own without any ads. This website is what you would call community or reader funded. You can support it by subscribing to other offerings I have.

This works because I’m just one person. It’s not like I’m a publication with a team of people on salary. I’m just one person and I have to be responsible for my own lodging, food, and healthcare and that’s it. That’s doable.

I don’t judge anyone who does run ads. Text is cheap to produce. If you’re a filmmaker creating videos and sharing them for free on Youtube, you probably need to supplement the community funding you get from a Patreon with ads. This is because films are very expensive to make.

My arrogance has a little to do with my integrity. It’s not all of it—thank god—but the two things do touch each other. When you run ads on a website, your readers are no longer just readers. Your readers actually become your product. The companies that run ads on your page actually do become your customer as a business and customers have a lot of power. This can shape what you write about unless you are very resolute and willing to threaten your source of survival income to get your own way.

Honestly, if I ran ads I think that I would actually be that person. I would probably tell advertisers to fuck off if they had a problem with what I was putting out. I might get myself into financial trouble but I wouldn’t be able to help it because, again, I’m a bit arrogant. The relationship between advertisers and creators is very distanced too since it’s always brokered by a third party so there’s not that much risk of that even happening.

The real reason why I don’t run ads is because the change in funding structure would conflict with how I write.

Writing is a very sensitive and mystical process. It’s like you have to get in touch with your heart and you have to prepare yourself for the intention of touching other people. You invite people in. That’s the hardest part for me. You’re sometimes scared of critique or rebuke but, mostly, you’re afraid of other people in a primal way. Writing is a relationship. It allows you to be in that fear and to move past it.

When you run ads, the number of views and clicks become more important. It becomes something that you notice. You pay more attention to the statistics.

I don’t know if I would actually be able to write under that kind of pressure. Right now, I have to be completely alone and in silence when I write. Writing is a kind of channeling. You find new thoughts when you do it. Sometimes, I write about things for eight pages single spaced and I know that these are topics that only fifty or so people will be interested in. For example, I didn’t think that anyone would be that into my article analyzing three different iterations of the narrative of Perfect Blue. It’s not even something that someone would expect from a website that’s mostly about astrology.

But that doesn’t matter because I’m writing for people. If even one person is into what I’m writing about, then I feel emotionally satisfied. That’s the thing that motivates this website.

That kind of pressure, I can write under. I grew as a writer in fanfiction spaces where people beleaguered writers constantly for the next update. That’s enjoyable to me and fine. But earning views and likes? I can’t deal with that psychologically. It actually conflicts with what I feel the internet is for. My opinion is that the internet is an archive, a memory space of sorts, where human beings show their strangest selves. The internet is not capitalism’s popularity contest. It’s primarily a nostalgic space and that’s how most people will try to use it.

To put it simply—I don’t run ads because my living expenses aren’t really that high. The community funding works for me and I’m not in a dire condition due to it. I also have other work that I charge for. I don’t want advertisers to become my customers because advertisers want statistics and that trips me out. I basically just want to write about things that I want to write about and find people who are also into those things here.