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On-line Communities - Ads or no Ads?
numacra asks: "There comes a time in the life of every growing on-line community where ads start looking like a good way to support it. What does the Slashdot community think about ads on open source and security community websites? Does it bring down the quality of the website/community? Should we start putting ads up on our wargame pages? We receive around 10,000 unique hits a month and are debating whether or not ads will improve our community or ruin it." Ads and donations seem to be the easiest way to drum up money for grassroots websites, however are there other alternatives which could cover the costs?
Our only problem was users clicking too many Google ads in their attempts to support the site. If you provide a good, well-run community, your users likely won't mind a few tasteful ads one bit.
Just don't use that godawful IntelliTXT shit or full-page Flash ads or whatnot. Respect your users.
Use Google Adsense.
You can always do what "User Friendly" did too. Offer something for "premium" membership. Might be more content. Might be a t-shirt.
If you have people that sign up for that, make sure that your message boards indicate that they're contributors to the site. It's a little thing, but it's nice to recognize the people that are actually supporting the site.
Good luck.
In general, Ads don't ruin anything. Whiners ruin things.
That said, flash ads ruin websites. Especially flash ads that stretch out over text. Floating DIV ads that block your content ruin websites. Noisy ads ruin websites. Ads that cause seizures ruin websites. Sites with more ads on the screen than content have been ruined by ads.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Make sure that, if the ad server is slow, your page still loads fine. Nothing pisses me off more than a half-loaded page that's stalling because of an overloaded ad server.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Adds and banners don't work. Period. It has come to the point that I don't even SEE a banner when it is up, even if it is relevant to the site. One of my favorite online stores decided to put up a Specials section on their site. They promoted it by way of a banner add on the front page. I didn't even SEE it until someone pointed it out to me. The reality is that after you have spent enough time online you simply filter out the adds and garbage to focus in on the information that you came to find. Since the net went public and the Web was introduced, I belive I have clicked on exactly three adds and never spent a dime on any of the sites advertised.
Ditch the adds. They simply don't work.
Ads can be very good for online communities, provided that they follow a few ideals.
They should be relevant to the community. E.g. no "OMG CIALIS NOW" ads on a site that is not directly involved in ED and other medical topics, but a "OMG NEW MINI-ITX BOARDS" ad on a computer hardware community site would be fine, as would a "OMG NEW XYZ BRAND SOFTWARE" or similar.
The ads should not be placed in distracting places. Keep the ad banners up at the top of the page, on the right side of the content, or on the left side, under the site navigation. In-line ads, click-throughs, and popups are all horribly distracting, annoying, and increase the likelyhood of someone becoming frustrated while using your site.
The ads should take no more that 15 seconds to load on a 128 kbps connection. Ads that take longer than that to load are murder on your visitors bandwidth. Not to mention the 40-something percent of people who still use dial-up connections.
The ads should be work-safe. Scantily-clad females do not a good ad make, contrary to popular thinking, and might cause some users to not visit the site anymore because their bosses might see it as being inappropriate, all thanks to the ads.
Other than that, just be considerate to your users, and see the site + ads from there perspective. Ads can greatly enhance a site, or utterly destroy it by making it difficult to read and use. It's all in the material and positioning.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Do you need flash to work? If not turn it off.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Another way to make money through your site is with Amazon's affiliate program...
Everyone should buy this book so Frazer will be able to afford drawing classes.
The mercenary nature of Mr Frazer and the tactics he used to make money are why I stopped frequenting userfriendly.org years ago.