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?

Comments

Something Awful

[Anonymous Coward]

The Something Awful forums has banner ads with two seperate price points: commercial and non-commercial. They both get the same exposure but the noncommercial ads are I think $5 and the commercial ads are $100. As a result most of the ads are publicising threads or projects the community is working on, guaranteeing relevancy.

Re:it'll be fine

[RemovableBait]

Our only problem was users clicking too many Google ads in their attempts to support the site.

Out of interest, how did you combat this?

I'm currently in a similar position. I'm getting (Adsense) click through rates of 40% and around 200 page views per day. I'm 90% certain that this is just friends and others clicking to support me, and I'm worried that Google will pull my account because of it. I just find it highly suspicious, considering my site (blockavoid.co.uk) isn't even complete!

Any suggestions?

Re:Do it, but do it wisely.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"99% of users will ignore it, and the remaining 1% tends to make a one-off payment of $5. Useful? Yes. But I've not seen enough recurring donations to offset hosting costs."

Are we talking about just adding the butotn, or are we talking about providing a goal? I help run a site that used to do the 'donation goal' method, and actually it worked. "We need $189.23 by the end of July", and we'd consistently hit the goal. What I don't know, however, is whether or not our site was specialized enough to warrant it.

Google ad rates

[Ankh]

I get about $200 to $300 per month with Google AdSense (the terms and conditions let me say that but not give you the click-through rate) from http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ -- it's been rising slightly each month over the past year. Since it's an image site, there's a relatively high bandwidth use, and this does pay for the hosting.

It's a trade-off. The Google text-only ads are not too distracting, and are relatively well targeted so they might actually be interesting. I've tried other advertising programmes, but those were best so far.

In many ways, like you, I'd rather not have ads at all. But it needs to cover its costs, I couldn't afford to run the Web site otherwise.

The people who say, ask the community, if it's community-run, are onto the right track. Of course, most of the people clicking on the ads will likely be visitors not part of the community, and the members will quickly learn to ignore the ads, as long as they are not too disruptive.

Google adsense is easier than having a shopping cart that accepts credit card payments for membership, and you don't have the trust issues. But if you already accept payments over SSL, you should consider "no ad" subscriptions. You could also consider saying that anyone who has been registered more than 3 months (say), or who has more than 6 gigapoints, or posts more than 30 times a day, or however you mark More Valued Contributors, doesn't need to see ads. They are busily making pages for you that will have ads on them and bring in revenue, so that's enough. And that way you encourage participation without charging anyone.