Some changes to ads on BroncosForums site
I'm having to make a few changes to ads placed on the BroncosForums.com site. This year, my ad revenue has fallen through the floor.
In past years, during the five or six months of football season, I made enough revenue to cover the cost of the site in those months, some months even a little extra, and then in the offseason, had the revenue fall quite a bit short of the monthly expenses. Over the course of the year, the ad revenue always falls short of the cost of the server, backup/test server and other things I do (probably overkill) to try and make sure BroncosForums has as close to zero downtime as possible, and runs as fast as possible and can handle a load spike if there is "huge" Broncos news. Last September, for instance, I upgraded the server to a new much faster server with more RAM and both an SSD RAID (faster than traditional drives) and 1 TB traditional RAID for speed and redundancy.
All of that is fine, because I'm a passionate fan and this is one of the ways I show my support for the Broncos and Broncos community.
That said, my revenue has been steadily declining, which means what I subsidize every month has been increasing, because advertisers are getting pickier and pickier about what they pay for. I've tried to make ads as unobtrusive as possible putting many of them at the bottom of pages, or at the end of a thread, but advertisers have started paying pennies (actually fractions of pennies -- $.0001 for each ad displayed lower in pages) for ads like this. They are requiring ads to be "above the fold" or they pay virtually nothing. Above the fold is an old newspaper term, which meant literally, above the fold on a newspaper, such that you would see it in a newspaper dispenser. In the online world, they translate above the fold to mean it's viewed when you pull up the page without scrolling down. With the exception of a couple ads on the home page, none of my ads are visible when a page first displays, so they are not above the fold, and therefore on the most frequently visited pages (User CP, what's new, threads themselves, etc.) I get paid virtually nothing for each ad display.
So, I'm going to have to make a few changes, to try and get a little closer to break even. The main difference is putting a new ad towards the top of the page, which you can see below the navigation bar. Most of the time it will be an ad like you see, but every once in a while, when the advertisers are running a higher paying campaign, it will be a little wider and about twice as tall as this standard ad, but in the same location. They limited how many times these larger billboard ads runs, so for a given advertiser, you will only see it a few times a day. By and large, I don't think this is going to change the feel of the site much, other than being not quite as "clean" with that ad near the top.
If possible, I would ask you not to use ad blockers on BroncosForums, or if you do use an ad blocker, to white list BroncosForums so the ads on this site display. Nobody likes ads, but the primary server rental and server support is over $350 a month, which doesn't include the cost of the backup server used to store backups off the server, in case of a complete crash, testing server for upgrades, domain and forum fees, the monthly fee for the monitoring company that checks every two minutes to make sure BroncosForums is up, and alerts me if BroncosForums has been down for more than six minutes, etc.
What the ad company recommended and said most sites are going to and that advertisers pay the most for, are those ads you are seeing more and more, where before going to to a site, it redirects you to a full page ad, and they usually have a "continue to site" link in the upper right. I don't like those and I Know you wouldn't either. So, I told them that was out. Instead, I've added the new ad on top, and might see if there is anyplace to stick another non, or not too, obtrusive ad above the fold. Beyond that, I'm going to try and not make any other changes to the site and see how revenues look over the next month or two.
Thanks in advance for your understanding, and sorry I have had to add another ad or two and put them in more "in your face" locations.
T
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Originally Posted by Pudge
Do what needs done man, this site is awesome. As for clash of clans, I wl petition supercell and see if my lvl 114 can donate gold/elixer to fund the site 
