Serving ad content on a Web site or in a free app is a contentious thing. Unfortunately we have development and hosting costs, and while we want to give away most of our apps for free, we have to include some way to try to drive some revenue. So, we include ads in the free versions of our apps.
That said, we aren’t evil, so we spent the time to create our own ad engine pretty much entirely to protect you, our users. Here’s are the commitments we make to you regarding ads in our free apps:
- We serve you ads in our app directly ourselves. We don’t embed third party code because when other sites do that you end up getting tracked around the Internet like nobody’s business. No, seriously, it’s nobody’s business what you do on the Internet. Skystone Software doesn’t track you. Ever. We don’t let other people do it through our apps either. When we serve you an ad, it is nothing more than an image and a link. There are no tracking cookies or database records that make a note that you were served up the ad. We make no money from impressions or views, because nobody tracks those things in our apps. We hope you click through the ads we show you that you find interesting because this will help us cover our costs, but if you don’t want to you don’t have to participate. That’s cool. We understand.
- Our ads will never slow down the functionality of our apps. We load them last, and we do it in the background. If something goes wrong, the ad just doesn’t show. It doesn’t keep your page from loading or the app from functioning. That would suck. We don’t suck.
- We choose every ad you see personally. There’s no algorithm that reads your e-mail and delivers you targeted advertisements. We only include ads for companies and products that we support and believe in. There’s no SPAM, no malware links, nothing like that. You’ll see ads for places like Amazon. Amazon is an awesome company that we support. If you click through our ads and buy something, it doesn’t cost you anything to support our apps. As time goes on we will build partnerships with other vendors. But we will never farm out ad delivery to some shady organization that monitors everything you do on the Internet and targets your ads accordingly. That’s evil. And like we said, that’s not us.
- We make premium pay versions of all our apps available to you, and you can upgrade right from the app. Once you do this you won’t see any ads. So it’s up to you what you want to experience when you use our software. Take the time and get used to our apps with ads, and then upgrade to turn them off if you find them a useful service. That’s how we roll, and we appreciate your business.
- We don’t have any control over ad content included in articles by the feeds you subscribe to. We don’t make any effort to alter or strip out any content from the feeds that we display to you – those come directly from the source to you.
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