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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.
Provide your users with instructions on how to install Firefox and Adblock. Then none of them will mind your ads. Or see them.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
"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?"
That depends on the community, really. Would they be willing to pay a subscription fee? I can tell you I have. I pay $30 a year to a web community pertaining to my career. I do this for two reasons: 1.) That forum landed me 3 seperate jobs. I figure I owe them anyway. 2.) They'll host my on-line portfolio. Admittedly, though, I haven't taken advantage of this yet. Judging from the number of listed subscribers, I'd say they're probably doing okay for themselves.
The question is: Is your site worthy of subscription? Well, you're not asking about that, so I'm guessing probably not. (err I didn't mean that to sound rude. Sorry.) In your position, I'd look into Google's Text Ads. With any luck, you'll recoup most of the expenses regarding hosting. I'd also recommend setting up a Paypal Donate button. If you tell your users "This is how much I spend a month on hosting, and this is my donation goal", you'll probably do okay.
I know my opinion's not going to be too popular around here. But the truth of the matter is that it costs money to run a site. You may have the means to pay for it perpetually, but suppose that dries up? Worst case scenario: You gain a few extra $$$ to keep the site going through the rough times. You're providing a service for people. It's a small thing to ask of them.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I run a Debian community site and found that I was spending a reasonable amount of money on a dedicated host for it, (along with time too!), and so figured adding adverts was a reasonable thing to do.
But I know that people can be very vocal on the subject of advertising, especially on community sites where the revenue goes to the "owner" rather than the "community". So the way I tried to made it more bearable was to make it optional. Albeit enabled by default.
If you're an unregistered user you see one block of Google text adverts on each article. But if you're a registered user you can completely disable the adverts via a setting in your user options.
That means that anybody who wishes to support the site and view potentially useful adverts can do so. And anybody who gets annoyed by adverts can hide them.
The people who disable adverts make about 20% of the site membership. Suprisingly low I thought! (Although that could well be because people use adblocking software and have them hidden regardless of the settings?)
If you let people choose to hide or show the adverts I think they are happier about them. There are other sites where I've seen this approach and I'll always happily view them when given a choice (so long as they aren't flash. Ugh) just the fact that the site owners care enough to make it an option makes me more inclined to view them.
I guess it is just a nice change from having adverts appear everywhere on some sites with no ability to configure them apart from using extra software, or plugins.
After you've set up ads and paid subscriptions (for extra features!) its all about keeping them coming back;
1. Slashvertisments. Hidden ads disgused as original content! Two birds, one stone!
2. Obvious trolls posing as "news that you want to know." Flamewars never hurt anyone that really matters but it does drive up website hits!
3. Dupes. Make it look like you have more content each and every day!
4. User editable "tags" to postings. Make it look like you care about the public's opinion but, really, its your website. Trust me, no one is going to notice when you "edit" them.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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...
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.
Live barefoot!
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The mercenary nature of Mr Frazer and the tactics he used to make money are why I stopped frequenting userfriendly.org years ago.