I've noticed that there are ads all over the boards lately. Have you guys been receiving funding? If so I think that's wonderful. I'm just generally curious as to how and why those ads are there.

I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing they're now on the board because so many people bypass the home site and come straight here. So those people aren't even seeing the ads on the home site and thus those ads aren't doing their job as much as they could.

I see...I myself just skip everything and pop up at the forums. Would you happen to know who made the change?

I'm going to guess PreZ did.

Yes, PreZ added them, and they're there to increase our revenue possibilities.

They've been doing pretty well on the main page, but obviously the forums are also a major draw, and many people bypass the site for the forums.

I wouldn't say they're "all over" the forums, as there's only 1 small ad at the top of each page, and another bar of them way at the bottom, so not in people's way.

This is probably as ad intensive as we're going to get, we're not going to plaster ads all over the place, obviously. But seeing as donations by and large don't work, this is the only way we've found that we can generate some income from the site.



Lilith

As long as they don't flash (that's blink or use flash, now that I think about it) or pop up behind the forum, or advertise things that are contradictory to the site, I really have no problem with the new ads.




~blood rose~

Well, the content of the ads is customised by Google's AdSense, which is why they're themed to goth clothing/chat stuff. If they weren't actually targeted ads, we probably wouldn't have them... for starters they'd be a lot less effective.

And we'll never set up pop-up/pop-under/tracking/sneaky/blinky ads. They annoy us on other sites too. We want to up our revenue chances, not deter and irritate most of our users.



Lilith

Hrmmm...

Privoxy blocked http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead....e=text.
See why or go there anyway.

They don't pop up in my proxy.. but I see them at home.

I've already mentioned GOTH.NET is starting to use Google's AdSense on its site.

I chose AdSense because Google caches your website, and then using the text on the page, customizes ads to that page based on the keywords it pulls out of the page (ie. whats actually being 'said' on the page).

It doesnt work as well with the forums, in fact I believe only the domain ('goth') is classifying the ads shown on the forums - though it looks like thats enough - google does not cache CGI-generated pages.

As mentioned above, yes, they were added to the forums since a lot of people bypass the main site. To give you an idea - an average day's "page impressions" before I put this on the forums was about 3500 (actually, anything from 2500 to 4250 or so). Yesterday's page impressions (being the first 'full day' it has been active on the forums) were almost 14000. Obviously the clickthrough rate (percentage of clicks to impressions) has gone down from 4-8% (averaging 5%) to something like 2%, but 2% of 14000 is still more than 5% of 3500(ish).

GOTH.NET only uses TEXT ads from google. First, they're themable, you probably noticed the ads use the same colour scheme as the rest of the GOTH.NET site - so they're not too obtrusive. Second, unlike with images, the content is always going to be reasonable - they cannot flash, use gaudy colours, crappy "art" (can we say dripping blood bars and spinning pentagrams) and all in all keep the ads 'reasonable'.

GOTH.NET does indeed get paid for clicks on the ads - and to my surprise, the ads on GOTH.NET are popular! This pays for GOTH.NET's hosting in California, the hardware upgrades I've done over time, and in future, will be used as 'seed money' to get our merchandising off the ground (yes, within a few months we will begin selling t-shirts, coffee mugs, ash trays, etc).

Personally, I'm just very glad Google has set up such a site-friendly ad system, enabling ads to be unobtrusive, and still effective!

A small question regarding this whole affair:

Would it be possible to make the ADs open in a new window (_blank) when you click them? That way I could click more yet leave my browsing of the forums undisturbed. I can just right-click and choose open in a new window, but just wondering...

Sorry, no, we don't control the code providing the ad - we just include a .js file and provide some options, essentially.

However right click or opening the menu over the links will work ShadowCrow [MS users repeat after me, right yes RIGHT click]

Yes, he knows that... the last sentence in his post was:

I can just right-click and choose open in a new window, but just wondering...



Lilith

And that's ctrl+click for those of us who don't have a two-button mouse.

I apologise for that Lilith, I am beginning to suspect I am losing the plot as well as what meagre reading ability I have.