Blogging whores

You may have noticed, I don't have advertisements all over my blog.  There's a reason.  I hate them.  Of course, I'm just a small-time pissant blogger so I wouldn't make much money from ads anyway, but I did make a conscious decision when setting it up a couple of years ago that I wouldn't "Monetize" my blog.

Most other bloggers, however, do advertize.  It's their choice but I do sometimes find it annoying.

One of the worst offenders in this regard is the blogging community over at FreeThoughtBlogs (FTB). There are a number of people over there that I love to read - P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, Dana Hunter of En Tequila es Verdad, and others (even some I often politically disagree with, like Ed Brayton of Dispatches From the Culture Wars, I still read occassionally).

Problem is, they're all a bunch of fucking whores.  A couple of ads on a sidebar are one thing, but this website (which I believe was set up by Ed Brayton) is wall-to-wall advertising.

- An ad at the header under the title of the blog (and just as prominent).

- Five to ten ads on the sidebar interspersed with useful stuff like Links to Other Bloggers, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, etc.

- Ads randomly inserted between posts.

- Occassional pop-up ads (including some that make it difficult to close the page like the infamous "Viruses were found on your computer!" lying sack of shit webpage)

Some of the ads are also animated which slows down page loading.

While some of these ads are for things I'm sure the bloggers support, like Secular Student Alliance's call for contributions or ads for the Convergence 2012 (science fiction & fantasy) conference, other ads are for things I know some of the bloggers despise.

Many of the bloggers on FTB seem to be pro gun control yet ads routinely appear for a Gunsmith school website.  A little hypocritical?

The bloggers at FTB are also, for the most part, atheists (some of them quite militant - P.Z. Myers is infamous for publicly desecrating a Roman Catholic communion wafer).  Yet ads routinely appear between his blog posts like the following:

This ad links to EveryStudent.com, a Christian evangelism website.  What next, ads from Answers In Genesis?  Anyone else see this as unethical or do I just have weird moral qualms about taking money for advertising things I completely disagree with?

Some of the bloggers on FTB write frequently about feminism and their support of women in the free thought community.  They rail against the objectification of women and wrote thousands of words condeming some poor schlub who clumsily tried to hit on a girl in the elevator during a recent conference .  Yet ads routinely appear on their blog of big-titted, barely legal, submissive-looking girls selling tee shirts (I haven't seen the one with the girl with half-unzipped jeans lately, but that was a favorite for a while).

Not that I don't like looking at well-endowed, attractive, young women, I do, but then again I don't write posts about how much of a feminist I am - I hold to the Neanderthal belief that women and men have differences (she sure looks different from me!).

Another ad from FTB.

I live in a rural town of 700+ people, I know damn well "Stephanie" isn't down the road from me wanting to chat with a 50 year-old married man (I wish).  Do you guys really think this is an ethical advertisement for your blog?

Why do I care?  I don't really.  It's a minor annoyance in a daily life filled with annoyances.  Just a topic for a blog post and an explanation for why my blog isn't littered with crappy ads.

So, even though I really like some of the bloggers over at FTB, they are fucking whores (just like Stephanie, above, who says she wants to chat with me but really just wants my hard-earned money).