[Geeky Guide] Not Ad-Free, But Now Ad-Lite

Yesterday marked the last day to vote on my poll about whether or not the Geeky Guide should go ad-free as a change to things. It was also an excuse to test out Blogger's polling widget.

My thanks to everyone who leveraged their ideas about all this. Some voted using the poll widget in the sidebar while others left comments and other still commented at my personal blog or got in touch with me directly via email or IM.

For the purposes of this post, let's focus on the document poll results as seen in the image above.

While we only had 14 respondents, of that group the majority opinion is that the ads are generally non-invasive and didn't bother most readers. Given a large volume of my readership also appears to rely on this site's feed, I'm not really surprised - there are no ads in the feed after all and you can only get "bothered" by them if you visit the site directly.

However in the last days of the poll another 5 people voted in favor of removing the ads. While this was still the minority opinion, it still counts for a significant portion of the total votes and it certainly made me thing about things.

So in favor of recognizing the democratic process, I've sort of played towards both opinions by significantly reducing the amount of ads on this site. The ones that will remain are those above the blog posts and the first one in the sidebar. Otherwise, all other ads have been removed to pay my respects to those readers not in favor of them and also to somewhat improve page loading speed.

I had already been moving around my widgets and getting rid of a number of them in recent months including dropping the Viral Video Chart widget as well. I figure since I feature their videos and link to them often enough, I probably don't need to go the extra mile of posting their widget too.

I hope the less ad-heavy feel of the Geeky Guide is to your liking. As always if you have other comments and ideas, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me directly.