I imagine most visitors use Internet Explorer, and would get the full ad treatment. Myself, I use Opera with Javascript disabled (with whitelisting for sites where I want to use Javascript, such as Flickr). I also have animated GIF animations disabled, and Flash is right out. I never see animated ad banners flashing from one scene to another to catch my eye, nor do I see Google text ads inserted by Javascript.

One place I do see ads, however, is in syndication feeds. Sometimes. If a site’s feed shows a post’s full text, then I don’t mind the ad at the bottom of the feed. If the feed shows only a portion of the post, just the first paragraph or so, then I set my feed reader to load the post’s web page instead. This unintentionally bypasses syndication feeds for short posts, but still allows seeing any on the web page (assuming they’re not inserted via Javascript).

I’m probably a fairly unique case (with the exception of a growing number of Firefox users with the NoScript extension installed for Javascript whitelisting).

Worst case scenarios, the ad thing doesn’t pan out, and you drop it. If your writing is good enough (hint: it is, although I admit to tl;dr syndrome on the parts related to series I’ve never seen) and the ads are not obstructive, you shouldn’t be losing any readers over an ad trial period.

And the fact that Turnip the Scarecrow was awesome was something all my friends and I agreed on, as well.

@Chris Fritz: Oh, that’s what the war was over? Hm. I guess that makes a bit more sense to end it when he returns, but it was still baffling to see how everyone was like, “Oh, Howl didn’t die. OK, we lose.”

I’ll take your recommendation on some of the non-Miyazaki stories; I’ll pass on those recommendations to my friends, since it seems they want another anime movie night.

@IKnight: Thanks for the tips on the ads, the detail really helps. It’s true that RSS readers are becoming more popular but I think a lot of hits still come straight from aggregators like Anime Nano. (I wonder if the RSS reads count as hits … time to inflate my ego some.)

You’re probably right about how much I’ll make, but I say it’s worth a try. Better than nothing, and all.

My suspicion is that you wouldn’t make enough money to justify them, but I know nothing about the use of ads from a blogger’s point of view, so I’ll leave more experienced hands to talk about that.

As for Howl’s, I broadly stand with Christopher on that, though I’ve seen fewer Ghibli films than he has. Personally I was very impressed by Nausicaa (strictly speaking, apparently a pre-Ghibli film?), but Martin says the manga’s superior and I trust his taste. Lack of money prevents me finding out for myself.

For example, the war was over the missing prince. Someone in the background (if I recall it right) mentions this while reading a newspaper. Hoping this doesn’t pass as a spoiler here, the war abruptly ends when the prince returns.

Just about all interactions between Sophie and Howl leave me baffled and confused. Maybe I should read the book. Then I could probably look Miyazaki in the eye and say, “Is that what you were trying to say?”

I guess if you want a reasonable story where things fit together, you have to look past Miyazaki and pick up “Whisper of the Heart”. Even “The Cat Returns” makes sense within its Wonderland approach. I’ve read that Miyazaki’s “Nausicaä” movie doesn’t hold a candle to his much longer and better paced comic series it’s based on (something on my to-buy-and-read-one-day list). A lot of Miyazaki’s other works, such as “My Neighbor Totoro”, “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, and “Spirited Away” manage to avoid any deep thinking difficulties by keeping the story from being too complex, although “Princess Mononoke” had my older brother asking halfway through, “What, just where was this character going, and why?”

I’d throw out a name for a Ghibli film to watch as a follow-up, but there are so many which are so different, and I don’t know which one or ones would best match up as “enjoyable” for your tastes.

Everything else in your post deals with series I don’t know =P

(Uh oh, this captcha’s difficult to read the second word. “Libertad”? Well, here’s hoping that’s right!)