Making advertising controllable by you, the reader.

Last year, Matthew Haughey started a great conversation about advertising online and followed through by letting logged in people control more of what they see, or don’t see, on his MetaFilter*.

Hide:

Then earlier this year, wikiHow showed us how to give readers even more control by making it easy for you to choose whether or not you view advertisements on their site.

Following in their footsteps, AboutUs has released the “Show/Hide Ads” function on our website. Now you can hide or view our ads with the click of a button, whether you’re logged in or not.

A key element of working with wiki is that you know that you can do almost anything: add a picture, make a link, and now turn off the advertisements. Not only is the content of website editable, it’s the site itself, which offers a little taste of The Wiki Way.

Show:

I wonder if non-profit communities, like Wikipedia, would ever consider this method of funding by having the default turned off, thus allowing people to shop when they wanted?

*congrats to Metafilter for making Techvibes’ Portland Startup Index this month!