Hey, have you noticed that ProjectGuitar.com doesn't have paid advertising on the site? There's an important reason for that; we don't want any because you don't either.

We believe that advertising and its revenue have a fundamental effect on the qualitative standard of a informative journalistic or educational website. Neutrality, journalistic integrity and loyalties are questionable once beholden to advertising money. We value our ability to publish objectively and impartially without fear of losing revenue by offending a paying advertiser.

ProjectGuitar.com has a different policy to most in that we do not see there being a reasonable compromise between offering free high-quality content in exchange for cluttering up your screen with adverts you didn't want to see in the first place. Many online publisher's models are predicated off an unspoken agreement that by viewing their free content you must also view advertising to generate their revenue. At best this is a novel interpretation of "free". Online ads dramatically increase site loading times and are usually viewed as intrusive, superfluous and unwelcome; especially when user data has been collected to personalise and target them.

Privacy and not treating user browsing habits as a commodity is a priority for us. ProjectGuitar.com collects only enough information from visitors that is required to operate our membership system. Whilst we offer Facebook and Google single sign-on methods for convenience, we do not enforce their usage. Finally, we use Google Analytics to monitor basic internal site traffic levels and keep the site running cleanly (we all break things from time to time) and improve it for our users....not for advertisers!

The mission statement of ProjectGuitar.com since its inception has always been to provide a freely-available high-value resource on instrument building, repair and modification with a friendly community free of restriction or expectation, where all are welcome to learn, share, exchange and collaborate. To start placing this behind a passive transparent paywall of advertising, "double-dipping" by offering a paid membership ad opt-out or other compromise would be contrary to these aims.