Ads on the song pages

I used to live in Australia. In Australia you can have a hobby that makes some money and not pay tax on it.
A hobby is a pastime or leisure activity you do in your spare time for pleasure. What is relevant is whether you are aiming to make a profit out of the activity.

I recently started putting a couple of ads on the song pages. As most people who have tried this will agree there isn’t much money to be made from ads unless you work hard at maximising ad revenue. I don’t do that and so the money that came in was minimal – but hey – it did go some way towards expenses on the site!

However what I hadn’t realised was that some people may start to look on the site as a “money making” machine. Someone that I admire and respect told me very recently that I ran a commercial site. At first I was rather upset by that but on reflection I can see how that may be a reasonable thing to think. Then I thought that there may be tax implications and did some research with a result that I recognised that the ads were actually running against the ethos of the site.

I want OZBCOZ to be seen to be a hobby, to be a site that started as my own personal songbook site and grew to sharing those songs with anyone at no cost to them.

So I have decided to remove all ads from the site to reinforce that ethos and to remove any thoughts/perceptions that it is a commercial site. (But not being stupid I am keeping the DONATE button there just in case people want to buy me a coffee 😊 )