Have you ever been reading a news article on the internet and suddenly the text shifts downward and an advertisement appears? Or maybe you’ve been to websites where they have ads all over the article and as you read a popup message with an ad appears? This is a known problem with online publishing versus the way publishing worked before the internet. We aren’t going to lecture you on the complex causes of this problem, however, we’d like to explain to y’all our solution.

We call it a Low Advertising Footprint.

An advertising footprint on a website is all of the ads visible on a page compared to the content a user is looking for and the template of the site. Our goal is to produce great content where the content is front and center and easily accessible while the ads are placed in ways that keep them out of your way.

If we’re being honest, we’d rather not have ads at all really. The reality is that, at least for the foreseeable future, Texas is Life will have to run ads to make some of our revenue in order to keep paying writers and growing our reader base. Running ads allows us to have a scaleable revenue model that grows as long as we produce great content. However, we believe you came to read the article we wrote and not get annoyed by ads. Currently we only allow 2 ads per article. On desktop there is only one in the right hand side column and one below the article. On mobile both ads are below the article. No ads are placed within the article currently.

In the future we may include more ads on the page, however, we’ll always keep the reader experience in mind and do our best to ensure the ads are not distracting from your ability to read an article and use our website.