[gw98]

The person is a salaried employee. They are getting paid by their employer. The web site is a personal portfolio / blog /resume site. Traditionally you're paid in attention on that sort of thing and use it to bolster salary via opportunities.

Getting a few dollars here and there from a personal site's ads feels cheap and detracts from the article. Tip jar, fine. But ads no. It just feels dirty. Even if they are "ethical".

From my perspective (as an employer) I see this stuff and think holy hell they'll want to stick advertising on everything. Turns me right off.

[xena]

Author here. I'm sorry you feel this way. The ads are an experiment to see how much money I'm leaving on the table by not doing them. As of late it is currently just enough to pay for half of my server costs per month. This combined with Patreon means that my blog is cashflow positive. It's nowhere near enough to make a living off of, but it helps me get a small passive income and pays for all of my video games.

From your perspective as an employer, this should signal that I know what I'm worth and I am more than willing to negotiate for it. If you want the ads gone, please feel free to email me a job opportunity. I'll be more than willing to seriously consider it should you meet my requirements.

[isoprophlex]

I'm seriously not trolling you, please take this as a question in good faith if you can... (I understand that any message prefaced as such is immediately suspect)

How much does it cost to host that website? It can't be much more than 10-15 usd/month, right? If so, is it really worth it to recover such relatively small amounts through serving ads?

Maybe I'm wildly off in my estimation; personally I see adding ads as a pretty heavy thing to do, so the monetary benefits would have to clearly outweigh that...

[ilyt]

How dare they monetize their time outside of work! You're supposed to work for someone so they can sell your work for more and keep the difference!