Has The Anime Review Gone Commercial?: The Difficult Decision For Advertising

For the longest time, I fought the pull of advertising. It has been a menace on the web, as far as I'm concerned. What with pop-ups and pop-overs and pop-unders (but no Pop Tarts), it is usually deceptive and almost always intrusive. I have only occasionally clicked on a web ad for something I found interesting, and usually it disappointed me. For 7 years, this site has been free from it.

Unfortunately, the honest truth is that I need some money to run this site. As a full-time seminary student, I am busy with classes as well as an internship at a local church. The finances that I have used to attend school will be depleted in the near future, though I still have well over a year before I can be ordained. This leaves me with some choices.  One is to start working at least part-time to pay some bills and keep us afloat until I get out of school. That's all well and good, but that also means that time for watching anime and writing reviews goes right out the window indefinitely. The second option is to place advertising on the site and hope that people use it in order to bring in a little more income.  I am not naive; I know that it will probably not cover our bills. Approximately 40% of my readership is from outside the United States, so they will likely not be able to frequent the store I'm advertising. But at least it could help, and that's what I need -- help.

But how do I avoid the evils of web advertising?  It's simple.  I have one store that I link to -- RightStuf. They are a top-notch company with some of the best deals going on anime. They regularly send me screeners of the shows they produce. They also offer a 10% return on click-thru sales. This means that if you click through my site to buy something at Right Stuf, I get a reasonably healthy chunk of the profits, over double what Amazon offers. If you love the site and want to support it, come to my site and click through to do your shopping. You lose no discounts in the process, and it helps this site immensely.

Here's also my other commitment to you, one that might seem very odd, but it's the way I see things. The links that you will soon see to RightStuf will only appear on reviews with B- grades or higher, meaning that they are either "recommended" or "recommended with reservations." If it's not a show I recommend or if the show isn't yet available for purchase in RightStuf's database, I simply won't put an advertising banner on that page. The banner will be under the grade for the show at the very bottom of the page, so if you want to ignore it, you can. In the immediate future, the link on each page will go directly to their main catalog. As I have time, I will be making the links so that they take you directly to the page that lists items related to the anime you've just read about. And if you just want to help me out and not search for a banner, there is a click-thru link at the bottom of the listings on the left-hand side of the page.

Hopefully this system will work well and help keep The Anime Review going for many years to come. I appreciate your understanding and hope that this will also help you quickly find anime worth purchasing at reasonable prices. Thanks for your support!