Thanks to new (and longstanding) King Cricket patrons

2 minute read

Those of you who’ve been paying attention and reading to the ends of articles will know that we recently floated the possibility of switching off display advertising for a year. This was predicated on attracting a few new Patreon backers. We can’t remember the exact number. We think it was ‘some’ or ‘several’ or ‘a few’ and then eventually it was ‘one more’.

We can now confirm that we have successfully hit this very specific threshold. Hurray! This means there will be no display advertising on this site until April 2025 at the earliest. No annoying pop-ups. No big squares promoting the exact thing you bought on Monday after conducting extensive internet research. Thanks everyone!

A lot of you will be thinking, “Well I wasn’t seeing any ads anyway. What’s the big deal?”

We probably should have explained.

The display advertising ‘situation’

A lot of you use ad blockers. This makes for a cleaner, less irritating web experience. More recently, you don’t even need an ad blocker; you only need to refuse cookie consent when you first land on a website and publishers won’t be allowed to show you ads (or even register that you’ve visited at all – which we have to say is kind of annoying).

Ads aren’t great. No-one likes them. They annoy you, and from our perspective, they slow the site down and make it look cheap. They were however the only way of buying web hosting and time until the advent of our Patreon crowdfunder.

For multiple reasons, this site hasn’t been running brilliantly recently. After much infuriating experimentation behind the scenes, the most effective sledgehammer we found for cracking the nut of slow loading times was to simply switch off all the adverts.

A move like that doesn’t come without cost, which is why we made the appeal for new Patreon backers. The new people won’t cover the loss of advertising income, but it’s not just about that.

1. A few new patrons makes us feel a hell of a lot better
2. No ads means one less thing for us to battle with, which hopefully means a little more writing time

On top of that, there are all the intangible benefits of having a slightly faster site. Who knows? Maybe those will trickle down and translate into finding a new reader who eventually becomes another Patreon backer.

This is certainly the way we’d prefer to run King Cricket.

Thanks from everyone

The crucial detail here – the reason why both we and the wider readership are indebted to all of our patrons – is that the ads on King Cricket are now not merely unseen; they have been completely removed. Previously, even if you were blocking the ads or refusing cookies so that we couldn’t show them, the code was still there slowing the site down. Now it’s not.

Famously, our patrons don’t personally get anything whatsoever for their support. The King Cricket patron experience is exactly the same as the King Cricket casual visitor experience. These generous souls do however make the site better for everyone.

We always say that our features wouldn’t exist without the Patreon campaign because it’s the easiest benefit to point to, but the truth is that their contributions help us carve out time to work on every aspect of the site. Sometimes that means doing shorter news pieces. Sometimes that means trying to fix stuff. One way or another, running a website takes time and that’s what the campaign buys us.

That and no ads for a year.

Cheers.