When I set up this blog, I was torn over the decision whether to include adverts or not. On the one hand, the hosting costs, while not unreasonable, are still fairly substantial at around £10 a month, and any help in paying that would be very welcome. On the other hand, I was very concerned that adverts would drive away potential readers, and make me seem like one of the self-appointed "social media experts" that haunt Twitter, which isn't my intention at all.

I'm an Adblock and Flashblock user myself, so I would never, ever consider the kind of nasty, intrusive adverts you see on many sites, either videos, images or Flash animations. The one kind of advert I don't have a problem with is simple text ads, like you see on Google search results, and at a stretch, simple image-based ones. As long as adverts are simple, unobtrusive, relevant and don't affect the visitor's experience, then I don't have too much of a problem with them in theory. The trouble is, few are.

Now, I had no realistic expectations that I would get rich from this blog, nor was I expecting that I would be likely to earn any money at all from it. I was simply hoping to offset some of the costs of hosting. I paid for web hosting because I was fed up with the limits of hosted blogging, and wanted to have the flexibility of blogging on my own domain, and I accepted the costs of hosting as necessary for that. I decided in the end that adverts were likely to be detrimental to this site's health, would be disliked and wouldn't earn much money, so I chose not to add them. I might consider using an affiliate program (such as linking to books or albums I like and would recommend), but otherwise my site is an advertisement-free zone, and for the foreseeable future I intend it to remain so.

What's your opinion on advertisements on websites? What criteria do you apply when deciding whether to include advertisements or not, and what advertisements to include?