This is a repost of my new thread in [URL=”http://soundforums.net/required-reading/7513-advertisements-advertisements-advertisements.html”]Required Reading, here[/URL]. Please take any discussion there.
[QUOTE=”Bennett Prescott, post: 58625″]It’s been about a year now since we started showing advertisements on this website, a decision that we came to after much discussion amongst David and I as well as with this community. At that time we were entirely supported by user donations, which were regular and very generous. Without them we would never have been able to buy vBulletin, the software that runs this site, or upgrade to a fancy virtual private server hosted by the great folks at [URL=”https://www.linode.com”]Linode[/URL]. In many ways we’re still supported by donations, since I am unlearned when it comes to systems administration and David is relatively new to it. The #1 reason that this website runs as quickly, on as simple (read: cheap) hardware, in as little RAM as it does today is because of weeks of work on the part of Phil Graham and Jeff Knorr. Here’s a link to Phil’s blog about some of the changes that were made last year: [URL]http://soundforums.net/blogs/phil-graham/60-understand-how-sfn-faster-will-remain-fast.html[/URL]
Since we felt it was unfair to keep asking for donations (and thanks so much to those of you who have kept sending them in!) when we had a large base of active and intelligent users that advertisers would surely be attracted to, we started with a few ads. Our goal has always been to have advertising support, and not detract from, the site. That’s why you’ll hopefully never see more than one ad at a time – unless you have a really large monitor. You’ll also never see ads that get in the way of our content, no top banners, no ads in posts, etc. We hate this on other sites and will never allow it here. While we have tried several different placements and sizes, we have more or less settled on the format you see today. No more than two ads per page, usually a banner at the bottom and a 250×300 box at the top right just below the navigation bar. These formats are popular with our advertisers, and allow us to give two solid placements that are highly visible without being annoying.
Since then, advertising revenue has become the major supporter of this website, and user donations have fallen off – as expected and desired! In fact we have been able to double the cost of running this website by buying some additional packages that increase security, reliability, and reduce spam even further. We even have a little more room for growth, but the site’s use seems to have steadied at about 70,000 unique visitors and 500,000+ real page views a month.
The “deal” we have made with our advertisers, then, is to put their content in front of the best eyeballs with as little competition from other ads as possible. For this we can charge a premium, which is why we sell the vast majority of our ads directly. At the end of every month we send each advertiser a report on how often their ad was shown, where it was shown, and how often it was clicked on. This last measure, which advertisers evaluate in terms of Cost Per Click, is absolutely key to us being able to continue to attract high quality advertisers, which is absolutely key to us continuing to be able to support the site off little more than your use of it. In short, please click on our ads. If you are considering buying something from one of our advertisers, please let them know that you saw an ad here. Clicks versus views is a low ratio on any site, a tenth of a percent is a pretty good number. It doesn’t take many clicks to really make us shine, which will make David’s job a lot easier when he sells us to advertisers. If every registered user clicked on one ad a week we would have one of the best CPC ratios on the web. Easy, peasy, eh?
TLDNR: Click on advertisements, and support our advertisers, which in turn supports us in a big way.
In closing, I’d like to thank all our awesome advertisers for sticking with us, here they are in no particular order:
[LIST]
[*]Rational Acoustics
[*]Lectrosonics
[*]Clean Wireless Audio LLC
[*]Full Compass Systems
[*]LAX Pro Audio
[*]Meyer Sound
[*]Point Source Audio
[*]TC Group Americas
[*]AFMG
[/LIST]
Please, support these great companies so that they can continue to support us.[/QUOTE]
