AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m breaking into my normal once-a-day posting routine to make an announcement regarding blog presentation.

A couple of years ago when I dropped my paid WordPress subscription and agreed to tolerate third-party advertisements in my posts, I didn’t think it would be too obnoxious. At first it wasn’t, but then as my work became more popular I began receiving complaints from some of my followers that my posts were unreadable because of the high number of pop-up ads they contained. I didn’t see this in my own scrolling through the published material, so I let it go.

But this morning when posting a lengthy essay I observed an ad after every other paragraph for a total of six in all, some of which were video clips that I find especially annoying and distracting. So – since I had been thinking about it for a few days – I decided to renew my lapsed, ad-free subscription for the benefit of my readers and my own peace-of-mind. I can now go back to proclaiming this site as a non-monetized, “ad-free zone.”

To be honest, I had become increasingly skeptical of the fact that one of my seven-year-old posts has been experiencing 60 or 70 views every day for the past couple of months after I posted it on reddit. I can only think that someone is taking advantage by tagging ads onto it (something I had no control over as a “free” subscriber) and then orchestrating an abundance of click-through “hits” in order to harvest the fraction-of-a-penny profit from every one. Hopefully, if that is what has been happening, I’ve now shut it down, and should that level of traffic continue I’ll take it as a compliment. Of course I couldn’t trace anything, so just call me a suspicious Scorpio!