Manufactured Environments goes ad-free

If you’ve visited Manufactured Environments in the past 24 hours, you might have noticed a change that we’ve made across the entire site: we’re now completely ad-free. There is no advertising on the site, and that policy will stay in place for the foreseeable future. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I hope you like the less distracting design. I’m focused on providing the best blog experience for you, and hopefully eliminating ads on the site will go a step towards improving that experience.

When I thought about it, there were a lot of reasons for getting rid of advertising on the site. I’m fed up with the increasing commercialization of the web, especially all the people trying to cash in on Web 2.0. By removing ads from this site, we can take a small step in the right direction. Also, there are privacy concerns associated with online advertising because of tracking cookies. The Google AdSense ads that you see on so many sites use cookies to track visitors across multiple websites. When you visit Manufactured Environments now, the only time we ever will set a cookie will be if you ask us to remember your details when leaving a comment. Also, it seemed to me that recently the quality of ads that Google was presenting had significantly declined. There were ads for things that I was embarrassed to see appearing on our site.

So for many reasons, the ads are now gone. I hope you like this new change.