Policy Concerning Advertisements

While the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) would prefer not to use advertising, the circumstances surrounding CCEL's existence and continued operation currently require the funding generated through the placement of ads on the CCEL Web site and in the CCEL newsletter.

The usage (and the cost accordingly) of the CCEL Web site has grown immensely over the last 19 years, and the CCEL staff has struggled with how to deal with this growth and associated costs.  Consultants and advisers have recommended to us that we make our library a fee based Web site. CCEL is adamantly against this approach to meeting the increasing financial challenges.  Instead, CCEL offers its users the opportunity to donate supplemented with advertising revenue. Neither of these approaches alone provides a complete solution to the financial challenge faced by this non-profit organization. So we are fortunate that our users do donate and that our users do purchase advertising. In addition, we must use ad brokers.

CCEL uses the following guidelines concerning advertisements:

• We do not endorse any of our advertisers. We do not endorse their products or their services — not jewelry, not books, not software, not anything.
• We do endorse the books that we have in our "recommended" list.
• We require ads to be "G-rated" or "family friendly." This is somewhat subjective and often difficult to control because CCEL uses ad brokers, but we do not permit, for example, ads that would be filtered in a school setting.
• While we do not intentionally include fraudulent or misleading ads on our site, the use of ad brokers sometimes makes it difficult to identify scams and dishonest advertising. We immediately eliminate any advertising that we determine to be dishonest.
• Our advertisers do not have any influence on the content of CCEL.
• CCEL is ecumenical and therefore our users are from all mainstream branches of Christianity. Some of our users and ad brokers place ads which reflect their personal perspective. We do not endorse any specific denomination nor do we endorse any user's personal opinion. CCEL is a library intended to serve the whole church, not a particular viewpoint or tradition.