Back when I was writing the occasional “How do you find me?” article, I would get some weird ads showing up. On one occasion, I commented that the searcher had obviously just typed a homework question into google and expected an answer. All the ads on that page ended up being for sites that would write your essays for you.

“Hmm…” I thought, “That’s not good.”, and set about adding those advertisers to the block list.

Then, in another article, I ranted about those, ah, bastions of democracy (thank you, Tom Lehrer) who indulge in comment spamming and found myself advertising them.

Rolling back the enlightenment which discussed, amongst other things, my Uncles’ marriage after 36 years together (yay!) attracted some pretty dodgy ads too.

To my shame, none of these made me rethink the advertising, I just extended the filter and shook my head at the unpleasantness of it all.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the advertising around Fat is an economic issue ran utterly counter to the spirit of the of the article, and they were like “whack a mole”. Every time I extended the filter, another ad for another bloody health insurance leech or some other snake oil peddler popped up.

So, screw that, the Google ads are gone - it’s not as if they were making me a huge amount anyway. I’ll continue with the left margin Amazon links though - nobody ever buys anything I recommend, but I like the pictures.