You may have noticed that our banner spot is now occasionally filled with Google AdWords.

We've experimented in the past with Google Adsense, and we stopped when, after the Thai coup, our coverage of Thailand was attracting Google's advertisments for "Thai Massage Parlours". When the Google sales team rang us a month ago proposing a new set of services, they assured us that we could now filter out unwanted ads. So if anything appears that you find untoward, please leave a comment in this blog, and we'll see if we can get the filter to work properly.

There is the deeper question of whether openDemocracy should run ads at all. Wikipedia, for example, considers it unethical to run any advertising. I am less sure about that (and maybe less well funded than Wikipedia:). I don't know how much additional income the ads will generate. Let's say it's $20,000 per year. That is quite a lot of writing we can pay for or coding enhancements on our Drupal back-end we can commission.

But I'm keen to hear from readers. Please tell me if you hate them, are indifferent, or even actually find ads useful.

The GoogleAds are set to appear if we are not running any of our own advertisements. So if you'd like to advertise directly with us, please let us know as per usual.