New ad type on Total Motorcycle and in the forums +less ads!
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:29 pm
For those interested or courious...
As the credit crunch is hitting my advertisers I had to modify who was sending us ads a little and juggle things to keep a light revenue stream going. I don't expect you to know this but online advertising (everyone, not just me) has dropped by 50% over the last 6 months. With companies worried about their balance sheets and their worker jobs they don't spend on advertising like they used to.
Luckily, I've never meant for Total Motorcycle to generate cash as it's #1 reason to exist, so I'm not as hurt as a lot of other website out there.
But, I'm still down 50% over last year. Not that we are showing any less ads or getting less people, we are in fact, showing more ads because we are getting more people. Advertisers just have smaller budgets to get their job done.
What I've done is set up a type of non-intrusive text ad links. I've tested these early in the hours of the morning (3-5am your time!) so as not to disrupt anyone. These links are different than the ones you might remember years ago, they DO NOT interfere with your typing, the page or your text at all. I've even choose them to be in medium grey (rather than green/orange/blue) to make them blend in even more so they are as unintrusive as possible.
I'm also going to modify the top of the page to accept multisized banners so I can remove 2 ad banners at the bottom of every page. This won't generate any extra revenue (it will most likely lose me money!) but it will allow the forum to look "cleaner" and with the text ads I should recoup some (hopefully 15%) of the total loss.
I know no one likes ads and with me trying to limit the ads I hope that works out ok for visitors/members.
I'm sure you have noticed less popups for the past year. I've killed 96% of them now and even I don't get 1 popup most days. Although some are still getting 1 or 2, which I'll look into scrapping more if this IntelliTXT ads work out.
Mike
As the credit crunch is hitting my advertisers I had to modify who was sending us ads a little and juggle things to keep a light revenue stream going. I don't expect you to know this but online advertising (everyone, not just me) has dropped by 50% over the last 6 months. With companies worried about their balance sheets and their worker jobs they don't spend on advertising like they used to.
Luckily, I've never meant for Total Motorcycle to generate cash as it's #1 reason to exist, so I'm not as hurt as a lot of other website out there.
But, I'm still down 50% over last year. Not that we are showing any less ads or getting less people, we are in fact, showing more ads because we are getting more people. Advertisers just have smaller budgets to get their job done.
What I've done is set up a type of non-intrusive text ad links. I've tested these early in the hours of the morning (3-5am your time!) so as not to disrupt anyone. These links are different than the ones you might remember years ago, they DO NOT interfere with your typing, the page or your text at all. I've even choose them to be in medium grey (rather than green/orange/blue) to make them blend in even more so they are as unintrusive as possible.
I'm also going to modify the top of the page to accept multisized banners so I can remove 2 ad banners at the bottom of every page. This won't generate any extra revenue (it will most likely lose me money!) but it will allow the forum to look "cleaner" and with the text ads I should recoup some (hopefully 15%) of the total loss.
I know no one likes ads and with me trying to limit the ads I hope that works out ok for visitors/members.
I'm sure you have noticed less popups for the past year. I've killed 96% of them now and even I don't get 1 popup most days. Although some are still getting 1 or 2, which I'll look into scrapping more if this IntelliTXT ads work out.
Mike
