Reader question: Ads?

Hey, folks!

I’m posting outside my usual schedule because I want to get your feedback on something.

First off, thank you all for subscribing to and reading this newsletter. We’re coming up on 1,000 subscribers, which is a couple orders of magnitude more people than I ever thought would want to read my ranting about metadata. As I’ve made the leap from full time employee to independent consultant, it’s been reassuring to know that my approach (if not my career decision) isn’t completely crazy.

So far, while I’ve occasionally plugged my own consulting services or mentioned pieces of software that I like, I haven’t done any paid advertising on here. It’s important to me that you can trust my writing won’t be biased by financial considerations. (It will be biased by my own, sometimes idiosyncratic opinions, but that’s part of the package.)

I’m starting wonder, however, if I’m being too strict. If I were to occasionally include an ad at the bottom of this email highlighting a piece of software or something else that I thought deserved some attention… If it was only things I believed were pushing the industry in the right direction… If the rest of the post wasn’t any different than it would’ve been otherwise… (You would have to trust me on this.)

So here’s my question for you: Would you trust me to remain unbiased if I started running ads?

This poll will run for one week. I won’t necessarily go with the winner of the poll, but I’ll take the number of votes for each option into account. If you have more detailed thoughts, feel free to reply to this email (which just goes to me.), leave a comment on the Substack page, or contact me any other way you know how.

Thanks!