Advertising

Current state

Google AdSense runs on itisyou.app. The site was reviewed by Google and accepted for text advertising, and the AdSense tag is loaded on every page of this website. Advertising is placed automatically by Google rather than sold by me, so I choose whether ads appear, not which ones. The publisher identifier is pub-4472252904102516, declared in this site’s ads.txt.

Until this was approved, this page said no advertising code was installed. That was true when it was written and stopped being true the day the tag went in, which is why the page changed in the same release rather than afterwards.

No advertising runs on any of the ten products. Space, ATSYou, Dev, Tools, News, Kits, Clean, Search, QA and Plan each live on their own site, none of them carries advertising today, and none has advertising code installed. Where those products describe advertising as planned, planned still means planned.

Why advertising at all

Most of the ten products are free and need no account, and five are meant to stay that way. That is a good design and it has a cost, currently paid out of one person’s wage. Limited advertising is the least invasive way I can see to cover hosting for things that are free to use — the alternative is a login wall or a subscription, and both would make those products worse at what they are for.

How it is placed

Google’s automatic placement decides where advertisements appear. That is an honest limitation to state: I control whether advertising runs and can exclude areas, but I do not hand-pick each slot, and Google can change its placement over time without me shipping anything.

The site also contains a reserved advertising slot component that still renders nothing. It predates AdSense and exists so that any manual placement would be a reviewable decision rather than a paste into a layout. Three positions are reserved in it, all after substantial content — one on the home page, one inside a long article after the body ends, and one near the end of a product page. None is in use.

Unused space collapses completely. There are no empty boxes reserving room for advertising that is not there, because a blank rectangle reads as a broken page.

Rules that apply

All of the following hold while advertising runs here:

• Labelled. Every advertisement is marked “Advertisement” or “Sponsored”, visibly, next to the thing it labels.
• Separated. Never inside navigation, buttons, product cards or next to an action in a way that could be mistaken for part of the site.
• Never first. No advertisement appears before the primary content of a page.
• No disruptive formats. No pop-unders, no interstitials, no sticky full-screen units, no auto-refreshing units, no autoplaying sound.
• Consent first. Advertising cookies require consent from readers in the UK and the EEA, handled by Google’s own consent message. The cookie page changed in the same release as the tag, not after it.

What advertisers do not get

No say in what any page here says about a product, a competitor or a result. Nothing on this site is written or altered because of an advertising relationship, and the status page would continue to say that a product is unfinished regardless of who was paying for the banner beside it.

Advertising also does not buy a comparison. Named companies on this site are listed for category context only, with no relationship of any kind — see the trust centre for how those names and logos are handled.

The review

Google declined this site once, for low value content. The response was to write the pages that were genuinely missing — About, FAQ and payments and refunds — to take an unfinished page of speculative ideas out of the search index, and to put two tools that actually do something on this domain rather than describing tools hosted elsewhere. The site was then accepted.

None of that was written to satisfy a reviewer rather than a reader. The test applied throughout was whether a page would still be worth having if no advertising network existed, and anything that failed it did not ship.