A Few Words About Advertisements

Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia, had this to say about asking for donations instead of using ads to generate funds for their operating costs:

"Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others."

This really resonates with us. We whole-heartedly agree, and we really do feel the same about Cole Watch Tower. We want it to be "...a temple for the mind...a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share..." And we would dearly love for it to be ad-free. We agonized over the decision to monetize for several reasons, some obvious, and some very subtle.

First, we're not too keen on corporate America. Their slippery slope has become a high bank where it's getting tough, if not impossible, to see things the way they used to be. There's a parasitic culture out there spending millions upon billions to convince the viewing public that you absolutely must have this product; the next big thing. It will make you good-looking and popular, skinny and sexy, intelligent and the envy of all your friends, if you'll only buy, buy, buy it. This was, by far, our major moral/ethical hurdle to allowing ads on our site in the first place.

We would love to give you a totally ad-free experience across our whole web-presence. That said, you probably noticed we jumped in with all four feet when we decided to monetize. We live on very little income because we are both repulsed by corporate slavery. We don't have a problem with being career-minded, and we heap praise on those who have learned to do what they love for a living, and on those who are just now beginning to walk that perilous path; we just know that investing your life and your family's time to serve foolish men with material standing is the same as throwing away the keys to Heaven.

Getting our web-presence started has been far from cheap, and this is only the beginning. Besides the substantial out-of-pocket expenses, there's time; literally hundreds of hours so far; sleepless nights; several day binges of learning to code HTML, CSS, and Javascript; fanning out into new social media and deciding which ones have the most immediate reach so we could draw in like-minded people as quickly as possible. We plan to put a donate button on the main site in the very near future, but until then, if you like us and want us to be able to stick to our plan to be here for you for decades, we only ask that you tolerate our ads.

If you want to take it a step further and be active, consider a donation. I promise you, this isn't a lucrative venture. All proceeds, whether from ads or donations go right back into rehabilitating Cole Watch Tower, or tweaking our website technique and content; especially to help get the word out about the massive amount of education, culture, and history available to everyone at no charge via the internet.
It's against corporate policy to encourage anyone to click our ads. What I can say, though, is go visit our sponsors. They're not hand-picked right now, but they could be, with just a little feedback. If you visit them, and find you just don't like them (for their content, or policies, or lack of conscience), please let us know. We want to make the world a better place. In the meantime, we can parasite the parasites, and eventually do the one truly noble thing capitialism is capable of: voting out the unwanted with our buying power.