I wrote a post a long time ago about potentially funding science through ads in your open notebook (presuming you have one). The conversation was great and included a lot of different perspectives. The one prevailing piece of advice was that of caution. Advertising brings money, when money is involved there is investment, and people tend to feel that their investment warrants voice. When it comes to science there is the potential to be controlled (in whatever capacity that may entail), which is something that should never be incorporated into research.

Interestingly enough, I’m bringing this conversation to light again, but this time it is through practice. If you go to the home page of this site (click the title/banner above) you will see an ad for biology.answers.com in the right sidebar, just below my social media information.

I want to make it very clear that the presence of the ad in no way influences my research or post content. The material on this site is free to read and free to use and will always be CC licensed.

I decided to place the ad mostly because it would pay me. Which initially I was against, but after thinking about it I decided to go through with. They didn’t pay me an astronomical sum, but the money I received for the add pays for the website, which allows me to continue to keep the site running for the foreseeable future. This I believe is great for all of you.

Another reason I included an ad, is because I was asked to list the ad. It’s not a google ad that I’m trying to make money from over all time. Right now it is a one year deal and if it doesn’t work out then oh well. Because I was approached about advertising, and someone had spent time analyzing my site, I put some thought into the decision.

I also did it because of the experiment I linked to above. I don’t know if anyone has had advertising on their research site before, but if you can pay for any aspect of your research without government funding then why not? I may get a lot of negative feedback for allowing ads on my site, I may increase the likelihood people have open notebooks knowing they can have self-sufficient, self-hosted websites. I have no idea. We’ll see what happens in the long run regarding this issue.

If you have any comment, concern, or anything to say about me doing this then please, by all means, submit a comment. I also highly encourage you to read the post linked above, which is not my best work but raises some interesting questions. In that discussion, I never thought of specific banner ads, as most of the conversation was directed at Google banner ads, which change depending on the user and site content. With that said…

…share your mind!