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 that 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!
P.S. I know the mobile view right now is VERY ad heavy and I’m working on fixing that along with some of the reviews that are coming up super ad heavy. It’s just a temporary issue and will be fixed VERY soon.
