Hallo everyone

We have begun serving ads by Google! Yes, with effect from 13 Apr 2004, Google's ads have been appearing all over our Web site.

We need to run these ads to provide income to offset the overheads incurred in maintaining this Web site. We have been operating at a loss since we started in 1999.

The ads are all text-based so as to minimise inconvenience to our visitors. There are no annoying pop-ups at all. You can see some of the ads on the right of this column.

In fact, because of Google technology, the ads being served reflect the content on the individual pages of our Web site. Such relevancy enhances the value of the ads and helps our visitors find the information they need more quickly.

There are more than 6,400 pages on our Web site. And the content carried in these pages vary widely. By serving relevant ads to our visitors, you could say, Google's ads help us do our job too.

We have withdrawn our own ad-serving system due to lack of advertisers' interest. You see, advertisers like Web sites with huge page impressions, say in excess of 10 million per day. So, anything less than that figure is unlikely to attract their attention. We are not StarHub or Pacific Internet so we do not have the user base to support that number of page views. And, we don't think we are able to reach that figure any time soon or in the foreseeable future.

Have a good week!