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?

it'll be fine

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.

Re:it'll be fine

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?

Google Adsense

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.

First off...

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.

Adblock

Provide your users with instructions on how to install Firefox and Adblock. Then none of them will mind your ads. Or see them.

This is a community by community decision

...to be made by the community. Also, there's the question of which ads to show, who to allow to show ads, the quality of the ads, whether or not to have animation. Some ad has been triggering:

Macromedia Flash Player has stopped a potentially unsafe operation.
The following local application on your computer or network:
h
is trying to communicate with this Internet-enabled location:
img-cdn.mediaplex.com

I get this on a number of sites, but it just came up on arstechnica.

Do it, but do it wisely.

"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.

Re:Do it, but do it wisely.

"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.

Slow Ad Servers

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.

Adds don't work

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.

Re:Adds don't work

With an attitude like that, you will never win a free iPod by clicking on the monkey.

Ads are good

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.

I did add ads, kinda.

I run a Debian community [debian-adm...ration.org] 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.

Ads are okay

But I've been on some web sites where ads are double underscored to tell you it's an ad and if you mouse over it a block of text comes up, but the block never goes away. Ads are a necessary evil. Nothing in the world is free. But ads can't be obtrusive. I find magazines where an article is continued 3 pages later because of a cpl ages of ads or it's continued in the back of a magazine so you have to leaf through ads annoying. I find articles that have an ad in the middle of the text and you have to scroll down equally as annoying.

Ads should also, if possible, be tailored to the current topic. EX: If I'm reading about an embedded Linux project, I wouldn't mind maybe seeing an ad for http://emacinc.com/ [emacinc.com]. However I don't want to see an ad for an enterprise server running a huge version of Linux or MS.

If Slashdot has taught me anything...

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.

Something Awful

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.

Recommend a book: by someone who has been there

Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free : Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cash [amazon.com] Written by J.D Frazer creator of UserFriendly [userfriendly.org].

Bush vs. Schwarzenegger

A bit offtopic, but I find a certain obnoxious ad on a certain obnoxious ad-laden site amusing. It provides a button with which the user is supposed to help Bush beat Schwarzenegger at weightlifting. I always think to myself, "why would anyone click that?"

CAN'T SLEEP! SCARY FLASH CLOWN WILL EAT ME!

The internet is a great place to make money through advertising. But the people who make these advertisement should DIE. Unless they are the orignial crew behind Google AdWords, they should just DIE.

The most appropriate death for them would be death by flashing eplieptic flash advertising which they have created.

People use the Internet to WORK. Advertising is distracting to many people.

Are they minimal and well-located?

It's unpopular to say it around here, but you need to be able to pay for bandwidth costs. AdSense is a decent way to do that. As long as you put just one ad on the page in a good location that isn't flashy and annoying, who cares? Anyone who bitches can damn well pitch in a few dollars of their own money up front to pay the costs of bandwidth on such a site. Don't waste your time with people who expect you to run an expensive website on your own dime and who object to all advertising and other fundraising efforts. They just want a free lunch. The people who would rather give you a few bucks up front every so often for no ads, those are some of the people you ought to take most seriously on this.

Google ad rates

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/ [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.

Ads - could they ruin everything?

Hi, PullThePlug's management team has thought about using google adsense. The Problem is adsense uses content. as you can see from our website there isnt much content. We get our 10k+ hit's a month from our wargames, downloadable levels, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions? The problem is getting the right ads on the page.. I know alot of programmers dont want to goto our wargames and see ads for CD players and DVD Players. Instead, They would be interested in things like programming magazines? (dr dobbs?) etc. http://www.pulltheplug.org/ [pulltheplug.org]

Adblock.

For me personally (and this'll probably be rated redundant) it doesn't matter, I make use of the AdBlock plugin for Mozilla (also available to Mozilla FireFox) which does the trick nicely (with a few good regular expressions -- there's even an added plugin that keeps a list of regular expressions for AdBlock).
I don't see many ad's anymore (if at all) but I can imagine to some (who use different browsers or know not of AdBlock or similar plugins) it would affect them.

Donations

You can always do a donation system instead of ads. Now that you don't need to be a member of Paypal to make payments with Paypal, pretty much anyone with a credit card can use the Paypal system. Also, Amazon still offers their donation system.

I've tried ads, Paypal donations, and Amazon donations. Amazon only gets people who object to Paypal. And Amazon isn't very reliable -- they're always up & running, but they don't have much of a system for passing data back and forth, or for confirming who paid what (well, you can confirm manually, but if you want to do something programmatically, such as reward donators with a free upgrade of some type, you can't reliably do it in code).

Paypal is OK. They upgraded their system at some point in the last 6 or 7 months, so that programmatic confirmation of a donation could be achieved. So now when my landing page sees "someone just donated" I can confirm the donation is real automatically, and give that person extra features, without worrying that someone just hit my landing page without paying up first. That's nice.

But here's the rub. Donation systems don't work unless you make it very prevalent but not very in-your-face. And that's a hard line to balance on. Essentially, a donation button will need to be in your masthead or sidebar, on every page, above the fold. It shouldn't flash or blink or animate, but it shouldn't be tiny or a plain link either. And, your site needs to be a true resource for people. It can't just be something people do once or twice and think, "that was nice, hmm, what site should I go to now?" Instead, they have to come back daily, have to love the features, have to become emotionally invested in your site somehow. Only then will you see the donations start to come in reliably.

In my own personal case, my site did not reach that level until just recently. For over a year, I had to rely on ads (which do work) because I didn't have the donation icon prevalent, and I didn't offer a strong enough community for anyone to care. Getting everything just right is difficult. And that's why ads might be the best bang for you buck.

10,000 hits- what does that equate to in dollars?

why does it have to be unique hits? why can't the metric be dollars or volume of bandwidth, so people can guess at the amount of money involved?

Your community already supports your site

So you want the people viewing your site to also help support it...

You should really try to look at it this way. You can probably categorize most people into 2 groups, the anonymous users, and your regulars. The anonymous users view your content, maybe gleam a little info from your forums, and you never hear from them. Your "Community" is what drives your site, and adds the content to the forums, and returns often. So really, your Community is already supporting your site by adding the content to draw in the anonymous users. So why make them do a lot of the work, and then still have to pay for it too?

So the simplest answer is to disable the ads for users that are logged in. Fairly simple to do, and it seems to work well enough as I haven't had a single complaint on any of my sites. You could even have it show for all users with less than say 20 posts or so.

Re:Simple Answer

I agree. If I'm barraged by ads in an on-line game, I'll find another game or stop playing altogether. Since the games I play are ones like DDO, ads for coca-cola would be extremely inappropriate in the game world.

This is another example of obsession with steadily increasing profits vs. creating a product that sells well and consistently produces a good income. Wall Street has ruined many good companies with this mindless obsession.

Re:Simple Answer

Thanks!