I've written this to answer the question:  "Why are there ads on Coolmath?"

I started Coolmath as a "hobby site" in the spring of 1997.  Back then, I just hosted it for free on my AOL account...  I soon got tired of having to tell people that my site was at http://members.aol.com/coolmath2...  What a mouth full!  So, that fall, I bought the Coolmath.com domain name.  Back then, domain names were pretty expensive and I had to start paying for hosting, but I didn't mind just paying for it out of my teaching salary.   It wasn't that bad.

Over the next three years, Coolmath started getting popular -- nowhere near what it is now, but my hosting company was starting to increase my monthly fees as the site's traffic increased.  The growth was a blessing and a curse.  When the monthly bill was getting too much for me to pay out of pocket, I had to make a choice:  turn Coolmath into a business or take it offline.  Based on all the cool emails I was getting from students, the second choice just wasn't an option.

In 2000, Coolmath became Coolmath.com, Inc. and my brother-in-law, Phil, came on board to help me with the business end of things.  Over the next four years, we tried everything we could think of to somehow monetize the site (siteS by now) to be able to keep everything online.  During this time, our traffic was increasing beyond our wildest dreams which, of course, was raising our costs beyond our wildest nightmares.  At this point, we tried making parts of the sites "subscription" areas that required schools and individuals to pay for access.  Of course, no schools have extra money for this type of thing!  And the whole point for me was to reach as many students as possible...  I want to reach hundreds of thousands (which I'm now doing), not just the 20 who can come up with some money to pay to see the stuff.

From 2000 to 2004, Coolmath almost went offline EVERY MONTH!  Just when we were at our wit's end and about to give up, we were accepted by an advertising agency, BURST!  These guys really saved the day for us and the ads you see keep Coolmath (and all its other sites) online and free for everyone.  We are now reaching over 4,000,000 students a month and this is what it's all about.   It's a good thing that we have ads now because we are so popular that we are running server farms with lots of servers all around the country! 

We are also now able to invest money into new games!  Yea!  Most of our competitors run games that are simple embedded (like you do with videos) from other games sites.  (This is the free way to do things.)  The problem with this is that these games have links to the other sites on them and could take your kids over to non-kid-friendly gaming sites.  We always purchase the license to games so that these links are removed.  We are also getting to create our own custom games - i.e. hire game designers.  Double Yea!  And the ads are making all this possible.

The very best part is that we able to donate money back into classrooms across the U.S. via DonorsChoose.org! 
You can visit our donation page: Coolmath's Giving Page at Donor's Choose.  Coolmath is such a blessing.  We never want to forget that and we always want to pass it on.

We are with the most reputable ad agencies in the industry and are VERY careful about the ads we allow on our sites.  I check EVERY SINGLE AD before it runs!  We never run flashing ads, "warning" ads, those obnoxious "You are a winner" ads, dating ads or anything else that may be deemed as inappropriate.   We never run any ads that have downloads for "smileys" and other things that really just infect your computer with adware, spyware and virusses.  We do not run popunder or popup ads.  We do not run interstitials (these are the ads you see that block the whole screen while you are in between to pages.)  We do not have our game instructions on a separate page so that you must visit two pages to play one game.  (That's a trick to double revenue.)  In short, we do our best to be safe and not obnoxious!

Luckily, over the years, teachers and parents have come to understand that we need to have the ads on the sites to keep things running.  Most of our competitors have gone in this direction too -- either that or they are now subscription sites.

Please help support Coolmath by not blocking the ads.

If you see an ad that concerns you on any of the Coolmath sites, please let us know so we can remove it immediately.  You can reach me at  .

Thanks for your understanding in this matter and I hope you and your students have a great time and learn a lot on our sites!

-- Coolmath Karen