Injecting some reader friendly practices

Dear Reader,

One of the things I absolutely hate is when websites go all out with their advertising and it just ruins the entire user experience. My promise to you is that Player Theory will not be one of those sites. Not now, not ever. When building the site and doing the initial coding, I kept many things in mind, but the user experience with advertising was one of the largest considerations I made. Let’s face it, this website, and countless others, rely on advertising to turn a profit and to pay our staff to write the content for the site. Your presence and interaction with the ads on this site keep the doors open, plain and simple. Nobody likes ads. Our goal is to make the reader experience as smooth as possible, so here is our list of things you won’t find:

No videos ads: You hate them and so do we. You’ll never see one here.
No audio ads: Been to a site, had a bunch of tabs open, and all of a sudden one of them starts making noise and you’ve gotta play whack-a-mole to find which one it is? Not here.
No pre-load ads: I’m not sure the technical term for them, but this is what I’m gonna call them. Wanted to read an article on Generic News Website but are “greeted” with a giant ad or video in the middle of the page and a “click here to continue” link somewhere at the top of the page? That’s just terrible. No sir. You clicked our link to see content, and that’s what you’re going to see.
No pagination of content: On our list views, we’ll have page breaks, that’s just logistics so you don’t have 1000 articles on a page. However, when you pop open a review or an article, you get the full article. No breaking it into 3 pages to try and ramp up ad revenue and clicks. Once again, you clicked our link to see content, and that’s what you’re going to see.
No in-content ads: Reading an article and out of nowhere there’s an ad right in the middle of two paragraphs, that sucks. Not gonna find that here.
No popups: Everybody loves a popup (or popunder) ad for Live Jasmine right? Exactly, nobody does.
No overlays: Sticky footer that’s full of ads? Nope. How about a survey floating in the middle of the page that has an impossible to find “Close” button in the corner? Not gonna happen.
No sharing widgets: You know the ones, you mouse over it and suddenly a fly out menu appears with 20 different social icons all in your face. Even the ones that have pictures of your friends. We just have tiny, normal, little icons like this: That’s not so bad right?
No forced social integration: Want to comment on our site? That’s fantastic! We don’t require a Facebook login or bombard you for your Twitter handle. You don’t want us having access to your social life, and we don’t want to see those embarrassing high school photos you forgot you were tagged in!

These are the goals we aim to live by as we try to make a living off of this site. Ads are unavoidable, but I hope that this list helps you better understand the kinds of things you won’t find here. If you like our content and you think our ad guidelines are fair, why not whitelist us in your ad blocker? Even if you don’t click on an ad and just scroll right on past them, every bit helps. We can’t promise that every ad will be relevant to you, and we can’t make you click them. I just ask that you take a quick glance, if it’s something you’re interested in, go for it, click it, that’s what it’s there for! If you think it’s a bogus ad, hopefully we have placed it out of the way so it doesn’t bug you or hinder your enjoyment of our site. We can’t guarantee that that an occasional annoying ad won’t slip through, but if one does, let us know and we’ll blacklist it so you, and all our other readers, never see it again.

Sincerely, Jeff Bond
Founder / Owner, Player Theory