There are four advertisements on this site, and they all live on one page. That is the entire commercial operation of Tech Knows You: four Google-served tiles in a labelled grid on the landing page — the Exhibit — paying for everything else you read here. An ad-funded blog about advertising owes its readers more than a coy line in a footer, so this page is the ledger: where the ads are, how the money moves, what we can and cannot see, and what you are entitled to hold us to.
None of it is complicated, which is the point. Every claim below is checkable from your side of the screen, and most of them are checkable right now, mid-paragraph.
The Exhibit is four display units served by Google AdSense, boxed, labelled and discussed on the very page where they appear. That placement is the editorial argument in miniature: the ads are this blog's primary source material, so they live on the premises, in glass, where the writing can point at them. Every essay page — including this one — carries zero ad units. You are not looking at an ad right now, and you will not be by the last line.
The tiles load once, when a person loads the page, and then they sit still. There is no timer quietly swapping in fresh creatives to mint impressions while you read. Google's placement policy forbids refreshing an ad element without the user asking for it1 — AdSense is stricter on this than much of the industry — but the commitment stands on its own: no auto-refresh, ever. A new ad appears on this site for exactly one reason: a person opened a page.
Declining still gets you in
Visit from the EEA or the UK and you meet a consent banner before you meet the Exhibit. Since January 2024, any publisher showing personalised Google ads there has had to put the question through a Google-certified consent management platform,2 and this site does. Decline, and the Exhibit still loads — the tiles are simply non-personalised, picked from context and rough geography rather than from the profile the machine keeps on you. What that profile looks like, and how an ad finds you through it, is the subject of another essay.
Decline here is a real option, not a maze: one banner, two buttons of equal weight, no pre-ticked boxes, no second screen where 'legitimate interest' waits with everything switched back on. Change your mind in either direction and it is one click, not an excavation.
The wall we cannot see over
Now the fact the whole site leans on: we never see, store or touch the ads. Each tile is a cross-origin iframe — a small page from Google's servers embedded in ours — and the browser's same-origin policy makes its contents unreadable to the page that hosts it.3 We cannot inspect the creative, log it, or swap it for something more flattering. The hand the auction dealt you in the moment you arrived is yours alone; the editor never sees it.
The wall that stops us tampering with the ads is the same wall that lets you trust the writing about them.
That boundary is load-bearing. A site that could pre-screen its specimens would sooner or later curate them — quietly dropping the embarrassing ones, keeping the photogenic — and the Exhibit would decay into a diorama. Because the frames are sealed, it stays a live sample, and this blog stays exactly as far outside the machine as you are.
Where the money goes
Follow the money through the plumbing. AdSense moved to paying publishers per impression in 2024, in line with the rest of display advertising, and split its revenue share in two: the buying platform takes its fee first, then the publisher keeps 80 per cent of what remains.4 When the advertiser buys through Google Ads — as most small advertisers do — that nets out at roughly 68 per cent of the original spend reaching the site.5
≈68%
How much is that in practice? Small, and we will not dress it up with an invented revenue chart. Four tiles on one page of a small blog are a rounding error on a rounding error of the roughly $25,367 the world spends on digital advertising every second. The Exhibit does not exist because it pays; it exists because the subject of this blog should be on the premises.
The machine has a name for sites built the other way round: made for advertising — pages engineered to squeeze the maximum number of ad impressions out of every reader, by the ANA’s audit, roughly a seventh of programmatic money ends up on them.6 This site is the deliberate inverse: the minimum number of ads that keeps the specimen alive, on one page, behind glass.
What you are owed
Commitments, in writing:
- Labelled units. Google permits exactly two labels on its ads — 'Advertisements' or 'Sponsored Links'7 — and the Exhibit carries the first, along with its own signage. Nothing on this site is an ad dressed as an essay.
- No dark patterns. No consent maze, no countdown nags, no guilt-wall if you run a blocker — whether blocking breaks the deal is a fair fight, and it gets one.
- A standing correction policy. Factual errors are corrected in place with a dated note; anything structural gets its own line at the top of the affected piece.
- This page kept current. Any change to the model — new formats, ad units beyond the landing page, new partners — is published here before it takes effect, not confessed afterwards.
That is the whole model. One page with ads and every other page without; personalisation only with consent; creatives we cannot touch; revenue arriving at roughly 68p on the advertiser's pound, from buyers who mostly have no idea this site exists and so cannot lean on it. Advertising runs, more than its practitioners like to admit, on the gap between what is said and what is done. A blog about advertising should earn its keep by closing that gap — and this page is where the closing happens in public.