Our First Horse

You may have noticed that there have been almost no ads on our blog. It’s been this way for well over a year now. We have a few Google ads that appear at the bottom of our links list and if you search for something and no results are returned, you get a Google search box. But other than that there have been no ads. We also haven’t been sponsored by anyone or paid to write a product or service review. We didn’t start Our First Horse to make lots of money. The objective of this blog was to force us to document the experience, for our own benefit. If anyone else is entertained along the way or learns something with us, great!

But as anyone who operates a blog like this knows, there are expenses when running a website. They’re not very high but we lease a dedicated server and that cost comes out of our pockets each month. To help recoup that expense we’ve thought of selling some advertising space. We looked at all kind of blogs and other websites for ideas on how many ads to have on each page and what layouts were attractive. The problem is, most websites and blogs have LOTS of advertising. Too much. We never want our readers to have to wade through advertising to see our articles and posts. We’ve decided we’re going to experiment with just a few ads here and there. Small, unobtrusive and hopefully complimentary to the theme of our site.

Starting as early as today you might see a small ad at the top of our menu and another small ad at the bottom of the site near the footer. At some point you may see us review a few products that we’re paid to review. We promise: 1) there won’t be many, 2) we’ll pick relevant products/services, 3) we’ll be 100% objective (even if it costs us the sponsorship) and 4) we’ll clearly mark paid reviews. We’ll never try to trick you.

Most blogs have advertising so this probably isn’t a surprise to you. We’ve resisted for as long as we could but we’re caving in gracefully and with a commitment to keep it to a minimum.

Thanks for understanding (we hope you do) and if you see something of interest in these ads, remember that viewing and clicking them helps us and them.

Finally, if you have a horse-related product/service or something complimentary to the horse lifestyle and you’d like information about advertising on the Our First Horse blog, please contact us.