As the cliche goes, nothing good in this world is free - unless google provides it, I guess (horray for gmail!). But even gmail shows you ads. The reason is because providing any kind of service has costs and can get expensive fast. And ads are an easy way to help offset these costs somewhat, if not entirely.

So, because we don't have a huge base of paying members or contributing investors, we have some non-intrusive ads displayed to our visitors and Basic Members (free accounts). The reason we use Google for our ads are because they offer a way for us to display RELEVANT ads to our users in a very non-intrusive way without taking control over the browser or using popups. We don't expect (or even want) you to click on them unless you are interested in what's being offered. What we really want is for you to think that $2.08/month (when 1 year passkey is purchased) is a completely reasonable price for this service and buy an Advanced Membership to get rid of the ads altogether.

Some costs we will hopefully cover with the minute revenue expected from these ads are our current web hosting, domain registration, and other miscellaneous fees. Right now we're just renting space on a shared server and use an shared SQL Server database. But once i-ERM.com gets more popular (and generates enough revenue), we would like to move to a dedicated web server and SQL server database to handle the user base and generated workload.

Also, we want to expand our communications with other food related companies to offer you even more great services. But to do any of that takes time and money. Money we currently don't have. And without ads or paying members - this is money we will never have...

So, please support i-ERM.com and help us continue to enhance and build this website into much more!