Guest posts and advertising on and with Ackadia

Advertising on Ackadia

Intro

Aug 2025:
We currently have two adverts on Ackadia, one a link to a local charity we support, and a second, an affiliate link to Rocket.net, a cloud-based WordPress hosting company, one that we use and genuinely and wholeheartedly recommend. Not the cheapest, but it ticks all the necessary boxes.

 
tldr;, jump to: [Guest posts] > [advertising rates]
 

Ackadia is old!
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We might not be Huffington Post, but we were here long before them, before Google, before almost any site you can name. We had an internet café of sorts back when that meant dialup to CIS and BBS.

Ackadia started in October 1998 – some 26 years ago – and I was doing web and computer stuff long before that.

90s, 00s… Gen Alpha, Gen Z, Milennials… That’s three generations of web users that have come along since we began!

Might not mean much if you are hoping for a surge of traffic, but it still carries weight, I think.

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Update as of Oct 2024

This site is not cheap to run, if only for the hosting fees, so I will consider placed adverts and guest posts, with caveats (i.e rel=”sponsored” is going in there!)

Crunchy stuff first:

Note that I neither use nor feel the need for the likes of Google Analytics. I can put the wretched thing back if it’s important to you, but it can add to load times and slow down sites. Still, I applaud Google for buying and innovating it and for providing it for free (even if it ultimately boosts their bottom line).

Moving on:
For instance, companies I like and recommend, (WPAstra, Rocket.net hosting, Larian Games, Shiro Games, animal charities…) no problem, happy to help.
Companies that fit here, sure, we can talk.

But any ‘funny stuff’, gambling promotions, the toxic ‘drowning in microtransactions’ garbage, not so much. If I don’t like you, you ain’t going on here!
You get the idea.

Cleanliness is next to godliness, or so they say

I don’t like much about Google, but I’m with them on the idea of a clean, minimalist site. That’s why I ripped out Google analytics, which slowed down my site! I’m currently trying to work out how to speed up dynamically loaded ‘above the fold’ content, which CMS like WordPress can’t manage (as yet) nor can browsers heuristics calculate well.

With Pagespeed tests, Ackadia’s performance is rated 90 on mobile (4G throttled) and 100 on desktop:

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So, for me, placing adverts is a big deal.

 

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Generated adverts

Note:
I occasionally play around with Google Analytics and Google Adsense to see how they look, how they work etc. If you see them, in all likelihood, I’ll rip them out again as I just don’t like them or Google, but for now, if you see such ads, they are Google’s hellspawn!

That is to say, advertisements in place: there are NO placement or affiliate links or ads on this site.
(2025: Added an affiliate link to Rocket.net to see how it goes. This is a company I actually use and recommend.)

I fully support the use of adblockers, and browsers (such as Opera) that include a built-in adblocker.

I used to like Google Adsense, in the early days, before they got greedy. I did recently add it back, at the minimum (auto) setting. Intrusive as heck, so I’ve ripped it out again. Adsense was generating all of about £1 a month, so hardly worth the trouble. Might have another look another time.

If you are curious, I get around 10,000 unique visitors a month, with peaks of over 2,200 per day, with a normal steady average of around 250 to 300, now rising to 800, 1,000 day.

I might have a play with Amazon ads again for the same reason. Never going to cover the cost of hosting, but it helps – a tiny bit.
(There may be a few old affiliate links (for books) lurking, but I remove these whenever I see them)

That said, extra layers of security, management, etc are not cheap and with optimal setup I ideally need close to £3,000 a year to maintain this site. Double that with the shinier options (like iStock access). So, I will consider adverts if they fit. Read on.

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Advertising with Ackadia

Full disclosure first!

Ackadia used to be quite popular. It had up to 100,000 unique visitors a month (back when few people had internet), a Google page rank of 7 and an Alexa rank of around 50,000 or better. That was many years ago though and various health issues resulted in the site plummeting to obscurity as work here slowed and eventually ceased. Still, it has been here for over 20 years and I’m starting to rebuild the place again, albeit slowly.

I’m sure if you are using due diligence you’ll validate the ranking independently, but at present, especially as I have ripped out thousands of pages to work on them, the traffic and demographics are unreliable and frankly dismal. This though should improve and solidify in time.

Update 2021
Still nowhere near what it could be if I tried, but it has been rising month on month since I started writing again, with an average of 300 unique visitors a day now, rising to over a thousand a day at the peak. Mostly for the same old pages, but it counts. See below.

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As at January 2015 we had:

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Caveats

Please note that I will disclose any sponsored links, posts and advertorials as such and apply Google’s rel=”nofollow” ruling to paid links.

Why is this?

A few reasons really. Firstly because I only write about things that interest me (or bug me!) and that I think may equally interest visitors here. However, paid links and adverts allow a bias to creep in, or at least the question of it, thus I want to be clear.

Secondly, even for a small web site like this, advertising is covered by laws and rulings from the governments and bodies such as the FTC and the ASA.

Then there is Google…

Personally, I think Google are hypocrites*, however, they are the ones with the near-monopoly and have decreed that webmasters follow their rules or face their wrath and risk getting *blacklisted!

*(As evidenced when Interflora et al tried their luck and Google blew a gasket. No desire for them to flex my way, thank you!)

*For instance, if [Such&Such Inc] pay me for a banner without a ‘nofollow sponsored’ Google can remove all trace of me from their databases, if they so wished. However, if [Such&Such Inc] pay Google to generate the same banner in the same spot on my site, that’s fine. Double standards, hmm.

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Advertising Rates

So, bearing all the above in mind, this is a guide to advertising rates for sponsored posts and links, Payment in advance:

Sizes and positioning above are based on and assume a regular monitor, with a resolution around 1600×1200, sizes and position will, of course, move and scale down accordingly with mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

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Guest posts

I’ve thought about this for years but always been put off because my idea of a guest post is interesting and authoratative, while everyone else seems to think link-saturated drivel counts and that I should be greatful for them taking a dump on my site. It does not and I am not! So, if your pitch includes a line like this gem below, look elsewhere for mugs, eh!

We require our links to be do-follow and the articles should not be marked as sponsored

Putting aside the above dumpster fire, there is, of course, a profound difference between an offer of a guest article and that of a fair ‘guest post’ meant to promote something.

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A few rules and suggestions for consideration: