About advertising on this site
Why is there advertising on this website?We sometimes are asked this. We would very much prefer not to have any advertising, but without the comparably small income from advertising this site could simply not exist:
The servers hosting and running the website and its various other tools (e.g. the webcam, earthquake applications) create thousands of pages and transfer hundreds of gigabytes every month - all of this costs significant amounts of money which is paid for by advertising.
This doesn't take into account the time to write news and updates, taking and working on photographs, program new features (such as the new android app), fix the inevitable occasional bugs, replace soft- and hardware when needed, and so on - it is pretty much almost a full-time job.
Without the income generated directly or indirectly through advertising, for our own products and tours, or through third parties advertising (mostly google's adsense), this website could simply not exist.
Support us?
If you like to support our work and help reducing the need for advertising in the future, you can do this in many ways:- Recommend us to others, e.g. through facebook or other social media
- Buy our book or something else from our shop
- Join us on a tour
- Send us a small donation (PayPal) or via online credit card - even a dollar is appreciated!
Get rid of ads
We understand that advertising can be annoying to users, but to continue to run this website full of free information about earthquakes and volcanoes to you, we also need to pay our developer, servers and in addition, we spend lots of our free time on it.We were thinking of how to solve this dilemma. We decided against the popular option to install a paid firewall for all or certain content (as many media outlets nowadays do) because we don't like you (and us) to have to manage yet another online subscription etc.
Instead, we have now implemented it on a voluntary basis:
- once you send us even a small donation (via PayPal) or via Credit Card, serving of ads will be stopped for you for a certain longer time.
Your benefits:
- faster page loads
- less bandwidth consumption
If you're not happy, we refund you. Promised.
How it works:
This is possible due to a small cookie that will be set once we receive a (small) payment, regardless which amount and which "remembers" that the website should not load any ads.
Unless you manually clear cookies of our website, you don't need to do anything else next time you visit another page on this website.
