I'm considering experimenting with adding Ads to the site and wanted to get everyone's feedback on them.
What i'd like to learn about ads are this:
Can ads pay for hosting costs and we can drop the Patreon?
Will ads increase or decrease traffic?
Can ads increase activity (roughly 75% of the site traffic is from guests that aren't bots)
My thoughts are if we only show ads for users that aren't logged in with a message that logging in removes ads, maybe more people will log-in, and if you're logged in when lurking maybe you're more likely to post.
Personally, I have little interest in making GRB look like stltoday's forums where there's tons of ads and they disrupt your ability to view a thread. But there is a large amount of traffic from non-bot sources that comes from people who don't even log-in. I really like the idea of incentivizing lurkers to make sure they're logged in and more likely to contribute. And for those that don't want to even log-in, I like the idea of at least showing ads if they aren't going to contribute to the site.
I'll likely experiment with a minimal amount of ads through the month of March and then use that data and the response from this thread to standardize something to start off the baseball season.
Looks like Ads have been turned back on for the site.
My initial plan was to just have ads for users that aren't signed in. But apparently there isn't enough organic traffic not-logged in and we had our ad account temporarily banned for invalid traffic. So I guess bots are hitting the site at a high enough percentage not-logged in that Google didn't think we were a legit site.
To fix that I'm putting one ad at the top of the site and one at the bottom. I don't want ads to be a negative user experience so I want them to be as minimal as possible. In my opinion the one ad doesn't really kill the experience of the site but I welcome any feedback others might have.
I know some of us have contributed to maintenance. If we're going to out up with ads, I'll cancel my contribution. I don't see the point in keeping both.
I know some of us have contributed to maintenance. If we're going to out up with ads, I'll cancel my contribution. I don't see the point in keeping both.
I wouldn't say the ads are permanent at this point. I was going to run them for a few weeks to see if they bring in enough to be worth it. Based on our traffic and the average click rates we should be able to make about $100/month from ads, which would mean we wouldn't need Patreon and the site can pay for hosting itself.
But we're not a normal community. 80% of our traffic are the same 400 people and return users tend to click on less ads. Our demographic is heavy internet users, who also tend to click on less ads.
Today being the first day with ads would be the day they are most noticeable. We've made 11 cents so far today. If we pace to make $6 a month on ads then i'm going to remove them because that's not worth it.
I know some of us have contributed to maintenance. If we're going to out up with ads, I'll cancel my contribution. I don't see the point in keeping both.
Like Theo said, it would be great if we could attain a model that doesn't require patreon support from community members or mod contributions. We're not sure if the ads will or won't do that. If the ads amount to a few cents a day, we probably scrap them. If it would allow the mods and patreon folks to not have to support the site financially, well, that's why we're asking for your feedback, which we appreciate and will take into account.
I know some of us have contributed to maintenance. If we're going to out up with ads, I'll cancel my contribution. I don't see the point in keeping both.
Like Theo said, it would be great if we could attain a model that doesn't require patreon support from community members or mod contributions. We're not sure if the ads will or won't do that. If the ads amount to a few cents a day, we probably scrap them. If it would allow the mods and patreon folks to not have to support the site financially, well, that's why we're asking for your feedback, which we appreciate and will take into account.
My contribution doesn't bother me. Knowing people are freeloading off my contribution doesn't even keep me up at night. Stupid and un-American, I know.
So, considering my dotage, I would like to continue without ads.