Hey Sebastian,

Just a quick thought. Your website has so many visitors, and I bet you could make a lot of money putting some ads on it. But I kind of admire that you don’t. I understand people putting ads on their websites, because it is business and an easy way to make money can be quite nice. However, I can’t help but feel that people not putting ads are more… how should I put it… I often view them as superior in an intangible sense. I’m struggling to grasp in which. Attitude, pride, standards, noble? Hmm.

With your websites and ads, I wondered why you don’t put up any. You don’t need the money? Or is it from some kind of internal stance, and you wouldn’t put any in either way? By the way, reading your website feels, to me, nice independent of content cause no ads are there to annoy me. These days it seems you can’t read many good blogs without drowning in ads.

My blog doesn’t generate enough constant traffic to make me consider adding any, but… I wonder, would I? I don’t know. It’s like the pride matter, though not the same.

Ps. I liked your absurdity post

Best,

S

Thanks – good email and questions here. I see five points here I’d like to cover -

1. “However, I can’t help but feel that people not putting ads are more… how should I put it… I often view them as superior in an intangible sense.”

2. “With your websites and ads, I wondered why you don’t put up any.”

3. “You don’t need the money?”

4. “Or is it from some kind of internal stance, and you wouldn’t put any in either way?”

5. “My blog doesn’t generate enough constant traffic to make me consider adding any, but… I wonder, would I?”

Starting off -

1. “However, I can’t help but feel that people not putting ads are more… how should I put it… I often view them as superior in an intangible sense.”

I believe the reason you see sites without ads as superior on some level is because the absolute-highest-quality writers usually don’t have ads.

Sites like Paul Graham’s, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s, Mark Cuban’s, and Steve Blank’s don’t have advertisements.

There’s exceptions – there’s some really high quality sites with advertisements. But overall, the set of popular sites with no advertisements is higher quality than popular sites with advertisements. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this – I can think of a dozen potential reasons off the top of my head. But those aren’t super important – the important thing is, yes, by not having ads on a somewhat popular site, you do gain the mental association of a “no ads” site which is a favorable one.

2. “With your websites and ads, I wondered why you don’t put up any.”

"We don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 per day."

Linda Evangelista is one of the highest paid models of all time. That quote by her, half-joking – “We don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 per day” – is brilliant.

Consider the modeling profession. There’s billions of people on the planet, and a large fraction of them would be happy to appear in pictures and shoots for just the prestige of it. This would naturally suggest that the price to shoot with a model would be driven down quite low.

Then Ms. Evangelista comes along, and says, yeah, I’d rather just stay in bed and sleep if they’re not paying $10k or more. Ridiculous, huh? But she got it! And kept getting it.

Here, I’ve been corresponding a little with Jason Nochlin who is a very smart guy. He wrote this to me -

Your response reminded me of how I moved from a $20/hr web developer to a $120/hr web developer in about 12 months simply by increasing my rate at every contract bid I put out and occasionally doing some very high, just-to-see type bids. I never lost a contract due to cost (unless I wanted to ;) ), it was purely a mental barrier.

Here, let me summarize that, it’s important -

Jason: “I started making 600% more money by asking for more… I never lost a contract due to this, it was purely a mental barrier.”

Why don’t I have ads on the site? Well, I don’t know exactly how much I could make from ads right now. But let’s say, conservatively, I could make $80 per month. (I know a guy with similar traffic and similar audience making $500 to $800, so I reckon $80/month would be close to automatic)

That’s $960 per year. Hey, that’s really cool. I’d like $960 more per year, who wouldn’t?

But that’s not the level I want to be playing on. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll shovel shit if that’s what it takes to get me to the most important goals and objectives I have. But like my freelancer friend wrote, or like Ms. Evangelista says – if you’ve got the chops, you set your own rates to a large extent. I’m not looking to pick up $80 per month at the expense of other things. More on this in a minute.

3. “You don’t need the money?”

See, I love this question. I love the phrasing of this question.

Money is cool for almost everyone. Everyone could use money.

But as soon as you need money – and people know – you’re hosed.

And you know, it kind of permeates around you to some extent. When you don’t need money, you just don’t take shit from people. I met a guy some months back who made 1.2 million pounds sterling in 2010. Really cool guy in a number of ways, doing some interesting things. I’d have worked with him, and I had a skillset that would have been useful to him. I made negative money in 2010 (second year in a row that I did so), and you know, that can’t go on forever.

Anyways, this guy… we had coffee and ate some meals together a few times, had some good convervations, swapped some knowledge. But I was getting a strange impression from him. Well, not strange, I guess this happens sometimes. He’s a guy that divides people into categories of “respected on my level person” and “flunky” – you really don’t want to work for someone like that.

Long story short, he writes me an email and asks if I can run an errand for him while I’m in Singapore – something really trivial, he wanted to me to go buy him a bound leather notebook and mail it to him.

And it’s like, dude, come on, you can buy a notebook in any stationary store in any international city anywhere in the world. You can ask the concierge at your hotel to get you one, and he’ll do it. You can ask your assistant to do it, and she’ll do it.

So I guess I made a mistake somewhere along the line, because he’d mentally put me in the “flunky” bucket. I wrote back, “Sorry, I’m a bit busy, but I think you can pick up one at pretty much any stationary store. Good luck.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m willing to shovel shit for what I believe is worth doing and I’d always encourage that. And you might be thinking – well, hey, he’s just asking you to do one thing to prove you can get stuff done.

Indeed, he is. Yes. But in the flunky capacity. This guy didn’t see me as a peer of his, apparently, and he doesn’t treat people underneath him very well.

But what happened next was surprising (or perhaps not) – after I told him politely that he can buy a notebook at any stationary store (duh), he became about 1,000 times more interested in meeting up again internationally while we’re traveling, or talking on the phone, or connecting more.

I’ll run errands for someone I’ve got loyalty to. If I’m a guest at someone’s home, I’ll usually do all the dishes, even if they’ve got a maid. But the ability to take or leave any deal on your terms is almost magical. It’s why you’ve got to pay off debt and kill recurring expenses until you’ve got cash in the bank. You asked – “You don’t need the money?” – well, 95%+ of people in the world would like more money. Maybe 99%+.

But as soon as you need money, it becomes a lot harder to get it. People are naturally sensitive to leverage, and they bid you down to what they think they can. Everyone does this – wealthy or poor – people naturally hesitate to question self-assurance, and they naturally become skeptical and defiant of people who are doubting or desperate.

4. “Or is it from some kind of internal stance, and you wouldn’t put any in either way?”

So, advertisements? I’m not morally against advertising, it’s a part of the world and the advertising-supported business model has seen a lot of amazing media and content created on a wide range of subjects. The world would be worse off without advertising.

But there’s a few factors at play here.

*The first-impression credibility boost from no ads is worth something
*I’d rather work on larger things than low-end ad revenue
*You set your own rates to some extent
*I’m okay on cash, I don’t need the money
*Even if I did (which I don’t), it’s really important to look like you don’t need the money

And…

*Yes, I wouldn’t want to endorse something I don’t believe in

That’s probably my biggest beef with low end advertising – you get stuff on your site like, “Five Weird Old Tips – Discovered By A Mom – For a Flat Belly!!!”

I don’t want that crap on my site.

I would, however, love to have advertising from a company I legitimately respect and enjoy using their product – Lavazza for coffee, To Boot New York for boots (awesome boots, by the way), one of my favorite airlines (there aren’t many good ones, but the good ones are great – ANA, Singapore, Cathay, Emirates), American Express, Fidelity, BMW…

Sooner or later, it’ll probably be worth my time to reach out to companies I really admire to work with them. Right now, I’ve got a lot going on that’s more important to me and has a better short-term/long-term upside mix than reaching out to advertisers that I respect, but it’s something I’ll do eventually.

5. “My blog doesn’t generate enough constant traffic to make me consider adding any, but… I wonder, would I?”

Here’s a question that I always ask myself when I’m confused or unsure about something -

“What is winning?”

You could phrase that a few ways. “What are my objectives here?”

“What do I want, and how will I know I’ve gotten it?”

“What are my goals?”

But I like, “What is winning?” It’s succinct.

You’ve got to ask yourself, “What is winning?”

And it’s a constant process of thinking and re-defining as you learn more. You don’t want to get chained to your old positions.

Should you have ads on your site eventually? Well, what’s your goal? You get a credibility boost for having a popular with no ads, yes. If you’re looking to grow in popularity as quickly as possible and the cash you could get from ads doesn’t matter, then yes, go without ads.

However, if you’re close to being able to quit your full-time job and just do your own projects, even low-end advertising might be the thing for where you’re at.

It seems to me that high-end advertising would suit most people well – if you select the advertisers and reach out to them based on admiring their company and products, that could be a real win for everyone. In that case, too, you also inherit some of the prestige of your advertisers. I remember the first TED video I ever saw had a BMW advertisement before it started, and it made me kind of make a subtle mental association between TED and high quality. (Seriously, BMW is amazing. I went through their factory in Munich – go if you ever get the chance. Fanatic attention to detail. Inspirational.)

Even then, you’ve got to remember that any action you take that affects money is going to affect your incentives – so learn and be aware of all of that, but again and again, the question to come to is – “What is winning?”

Winning for me is playing on the Linda Evangelista level, so no “Five Weird Old Tips Discovered by a Mom” on the site. But winning is different for everyone – you define it, you set it, and you go get it. Five weird old tips might be just the thing, depending on where you’re at…