…because we believe that misrepresenting links as genuinely relevant content instead of just somebody else’s keywords-related-advertising content would be insulting to our readers. After many years of receiving only one or two such enquiries per year, all of a sudden we’re getting two or three a week.
I’m not entirely averse to commercial enterprises entering a sponsorship arrangement with this blog-space, but I’m not going to bait and switch my readership in order to present eyeballs to your ads. If you want to engage my readers, submit something that is unambiguously (via visual signifiers) an advertisement, that can also accessibly be identified as an advertisement to my visually-challenged readers, and that also relates to the readership of this blog rather than just the Googleranking of this blog; ie a product or service that is nonetheless something that readers here might well still want to click on.
Anything else is just you being some sort of try-hard entrepreneurial arsehole without an ounce of social sensibility.
If this describes you, then stop asking!
Categories: ethics & philosophy, media
So I only just discovered the Tomlin Rule 
This my axiom, by me, which is mine 
QOTD: on the blaming of progressive scolds/shamers for the rise of Trumpists 
Hoyden About Town 
Thank you.
Well said. Apart from the sheer nuisance factor, there’s also an “academic honesty” issue. Links in a piece are usually citations of relevant facts, related opinion articles, corroborating sources, etc. The majority of readers don’t have the time to click on any given link, but the fact that something is linked makes it appear that it is well-sourced. So, advertisements as links give the false appearance that more research has been done on a piece than there really was, or that something appears to be cited as fact that is actually just an ad.