The Atlantic Canada Beer Blog is written by beer lovers, for beer lovers. While it is truly a labor of love, there is no denying that there is, in fact, significant labor involved. There are also costs associated with the domain and with hosting the 6 years worth of existing content. We have partners and families who wonder what happens to us on Thursday nights. We have day jobs. That we like.
In the interest of being able to maintain the quality and availability of the blog, and to justify the hours that are being put in, ACBB is now accepting advertising opportunities. That said, we believe it is important for us to advise our readers and our potential advertisers as to what advertising we are willing to accept and to what extent advertising will appear on the site.
We are new to this and as of this writing we currently have zero advertising. As is only reasonable, this statement is likely to evolve over the coming months and, who knows, maybe years. We pledge to provide updates to this information when we feel that there is a reason to do so, namely that we acknowledge we are doing something that we think departs from the spirit of what we’ve previously said.
For Our Readers
First and foremost, while we don’t mistake what we do here for hard-hitting journalism, but we believe we write with integrity and we do our absolute best to avoid playing any favourites with our coverage. We understand that those who read the blog do so to find out about breweries, beers and beer-related events in our region, not to get our individual or collective opinion on any of the above. (To be clear, it’s not that any of the three of us are coy with an opinion if asked in the right context, but this blog is not the right context). We believe that accepting advertising from the folks we generally report on could call into question our objectivity and therefore we will not be accepting advertising considerations from any particular brewer, bar/pub/taproom or beer purveyor.
If we’re not taking ads for beers and bars and stuff, what the heck do we think we’ll advertise? The short answer is that there’s a ton of businesses involved in craft beer that don’t make it, serve it or sell it. We’d be happy to talk to those folks.
What will the advertising look like? Well, we have no intention of plastering our site with animated banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, click-throughs or other invasive forms of advertising. Ads will be generally be limited to placement of images that are probably, but not necessarily, linked to an advertiser’s web presence. As a result, we would, of course, very much appreciate if you’d disable your ad blocker when you come to our site. Let’s put it this way: we’re going to try our best not to be annoying about it. If we can be successful in that, maybe you can tolerate it?
Potential Advertisers
As above, if you’re directly involved in producing or peddling craft beer in Atlantic Canada, we’re afraid we can’t take your money. But please feel free to (continue to) send us news of beer releases and events for inclusion in our weekly wrap-up! And if you feel we’re somehow not living up to our stated goal of trying to cover everything that goes on please let us know – we’re not hard to find!
We’re going to try to keeps things simple. We’re not interesting in a complex pay-per-click model or gathering metrics or analytics or what have you. That’s way more thinking and, frankly, math, than we’re willing to do. We’re also not looking to be foolish; this blog isn’t going to make anyone rich, but it would be nice if it paid for itself and maybe a few beers for the authors along the way. We would much rather have a dozen (or more) advertisers sharing space and presence and contributing to that dream than one or two major accounts looking for definitive return on investment.
Still reading? Excellent. While lots of people may not realize how pervasive certain businesses are in the craft beer scene in our region, we do and we like to think that we are part of that same ecosystem. The bulk of our readers are certainly craft beer drinkers and fans of breweries and venues who want to know what’s coming up in any given week. But we’re also acutely aware that there are plenty of industry and not-quite- or not-yet-industry people who take the time to read our posts for many different reasons. Yes, we’d be happy to make a reasonable financial arrangement that sees your brand get some attention on our blog. Yes, we know there’s more to it than that. We’d be happy to chat.