Is it tacky to have ads on a personal blog?

Lots of people do have ads on their personal sites, so no, it's not particularly tacky. It's more the nature of the ads that you run that might annoy people. Big animated in-your-face ads will upset a lot of people, while a little bit of google adsense here and there will be acceptable to most.

Whether you'll actually make any money putting ads on a personal blog is another matter!

I would say start putting ads slowly. Small ones here and there... And then add gradually... I use AdSense on mine, and it changes the ads to go with what I wrote about... Which is nice! I wrote about my new place on one of my blogs, and next thing I know, the ad is for a closet company.... Pretty cool.

It's possible to insert ads that add value to your content rather than detract from it. Generally, this is called contextually generated advertising. Google Adsense excelled early in this game and it remains good at serving up ads that are based on what you're talking about in your blog.

There are plenty of other contextually generated ad networks out there. Some alternatives to Google include: publisher.yahoo.com/ https://feedburner.com/fb/a/advertising quigo.com/ valueclickmedia.com/Publishers.shtml kontera.com/ intellitxt.com/ clicksor.com/ http://www.miva.com/us/content/partners/arx.asp http://www.nixxie.com/ publisher.yahoo.com/0 https://publisher.yahoo.com/1 http://www.cbprosense.net/ http://www.oxado.com/ http://www.crispads.com/ http://adgenta.com/ http://www.kanoodle.com/ http://www.revenuepilot.com/ That's a start anyway. New ad networks pop up from time-to-time.

Online advertising is ALL about productivity, so it's important to match your readership with your ads and constantly monitor the productivity of your ads. I hope that this helps TooFat2Serve!

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.