I couldn’t take it anymore, so I turned off the advertisements on Fuji X Weekly. They’re gone. You’re welcome. Oh, and I’m sorry that you had to put up with them for so long.

Why did I do this? Why did I even have ads in the first place? To answer the second question first, there’s a real cost to running this website and doing the things I do. The ad revenue (which isn’t much—it’s amazing how little you actually get from ads, much less than many of you likely imagine) helps to pay for it. It basically covered the cost of web hosting and domains and stuff like that—not only for Fuji X Weekly, but Ritchie’s Ricoh Recipes, RitchieCam, RithieRoesch.com, and the Community Recipes page, too. I discontinued the ads for two reasons: the company facilitating the ads cut their payouts in half (which is crazy unfair), and the ads were just soooo annoying anyway—I hated having them. It was time for them to go!

Unfortunately, when you run a website, you sometimes have to do things that you don’t want to because you have your own expenses that must be covered. The ads were helpful in covering those expenses, but not something that I liked having. In fact, in my very first post, I optimistically proclaimed, “I’m not placing advertisements on this website.” That lasted a little while (although, at the time, WordPress placed their own ads on this site because I was utilizing their free plan back then), but as this website grew, so did the expenses of running it. I hoped that someday another revenue stream would eventually be enough that I could turn the ads off. That never really materialized, but lately Amazon affiliate purchases have increased (thank you for using my links for your purchases!), so I’m using that as my excuse: affiliate revenue is now paying for the expenses of keeping this thing up and running. I’m hopeful that the ads are gone for good.

It’s long overdue, and I’m glad that I finally did it: Fuji X Weekly is now free of annoying ads! This should make the experience of this website noticeably better. I’m sorry that you had to put up with them for so long, and I hope you celebrate with me that they’re finally gone. Hallelujah!