Comment Site cluttered with ads

RealHeavyDude

Well-Known Member
Since a few days the site is cluttered with ads that make it hardly readable for me. I know that somebody must earn money out of this but this is really starting to annoy me.
Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Except for the blank post which always shows up as the second post from Ads Master. That is sort of a clue.
 

Cringer

ProgressTalk.com Moderator
Staff member
Yeah but that's been around for a while, whereas RHD is bemoaning a recent change.
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
I honestly don't like the ads either. However, I do need a way to offset the server costs, hosting and bandwidth fees, and software costs. If I had to pay completely out of pocket, my wife wouldn't be too happy :(

If you get an account upgrade to sponsor, you won't be shown the ads.

I'll also look into reducing the number of ads and placements to see if I can make them less obtrusive while not having too much of a negative effect on revenue. I can also suppress ads for members with a certain number of posts, points and/or likes and will implement something like that as well.
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Ok should look better now, I might need to make some further tweaks based on how ad performance is affected.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Of course. Revenue generally comes from click-throughs. One doesn't click on what one can't see.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Well, perhaps not, but someone must. An investment site I visit now has a banner which reads:

We've detected that you're using AdBlock Plus or some other ad blocking software. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blockers while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.

Apparently ABP doesn't see this as an ad! :)
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
It is also possible that advertisers provide some revenue for ad views as well as clicks. If so, that would be affected by using ABP.
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Sites can take advantage of the functionality of an ad-blocker to detect its presence, e.g. by creating a document element that will look like an ad (and so be blocked) and then testing for the presence or absence of that element. If the element is not found they could assume that their ad is not seen in the browser.

As I don't run any web sites I don't know whether ad views actually factor into their payments to site owners. But it seems clear that ad blockers can be detected. That may result in a cat-and-mouse game between blockers and advertisers of mitigations against detection, detection of those mitigations, etc.

Also, ABP has features like allowing "acceptable advertisements" and advertiser whitelists.
 

Cringer

ProgressTalk.com Moderator
Staff member
For the benefit of the continued revenues of this site I am going to add ProgressTalk to the exceptions so that I still see ads here.
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Chris, does the use of adblock affect your revenues?

Very likely it has no impact at all on the bottom line.

I am using Google Adsense to deliver ads here, and most advertising campaigns are paid CPC, cost per click. The CPM (view) earnings for a "small" site like this are pennies.

So if you never click on ads, there is no downside to hiding them.
 
Top