Just to wrap this up, so far I have gotten mixed reviews about the new ad units on the site. Personally I think they look fine, but that is because I put them there ;) But just to say that they are providing all of the revenue we've lost from disabling the other ads, and are generating very good results. They obviously aren't entirely unwanted, as they are generating decent clickthrus as well. I think that from my standpoint, our main competitor at this point is www.experts-exchange.com, the only other successful I.T. forum that covers as much as we do. And when you consider that to compensate for the costs, they not only show ads, but they also charge a mandatory $10/month to all members, DaniWeb isn't so bad off ;) I'm doing as much as I can to keep DaniWeb advertiser-supported and not member-supported ... members contribute way more than enough as it is! If you guys have any suggestions, please do let me know. I am always open to ideas. But just to keep you guys posted - these new ads take us out of any financial crisis and put us in good, no-worry territory.
Can you try to have non-animated banners only?
More than a bit distracting (which is the purpose of the animation I know, to the annoyance of the reader ;) ...).
And yes, the banner placement is fine. Far better than some sites I (used to) frequent where there's banners galore down all sides of the page as well as spread all over the text.
Were you in the red the two prior years you only had three advertisements on your site?
How much are you paying for your hosting services? Are you exceeding your bandwidth, and being charged a premium fee?
Explain losing revenue, since before the $2,500 campaign there was virtually no other revenue. How, then, could you be losing money? And why weren't you losing money the prior two years?
If the campaign is $2,500 a month then: $2,500/mth = $83.3/day
So you are meaning to say 96% off your campaign funding came from 3 ads?
If the campaign is $2,500/yr and your hosting is $250/month, then that's 10 months of hosting. Which you were still hosting before you had a campaign.
With the exception of a $400 trademark, $100 incorporation fee, $500 legal fees, why do the expenses suddenly outweigh revenue? What type of corporaton is DaniWeb? And why can't I find a filed DaniWeb trademark?
And please tell me why there is a sudden loss of revenue after getting a campaign? What new expenses have been incurred after securing an ad campaign that places you in the red if the campaign funding is reduced?
I could keep asking questions, but they would all derive from the same thought-process.
Hey Stack! Don't be mean to me ;) No corporation, just lil ol' me.
In the past, most of our revenue was derived from selling text link advertisements. If you notice, there is now only one text ad at the bottom ... in prior months, there were a couple, each one going for a few hundred dollars. In addition, google adsense has always been used in addition to selling advertising directly.
Unfortunately, that $2,500 campaign fell through, and all money was reimbursed. It turns out that the site owner had not thoroughly thought out their business plan, or something along those lines.
This brings all of our revenue back to text ads and google ads and banner ads. As I just said, many text ad people didn't renew for some reason or another :( And google has dropped the payout they offer via AdSense since they went public for some reason.
So that leaves banner ads for nearly all of our revenue ... which means that such ads comprimise a much larger percentage of our revenue than in the past.
Please also keep in mind, however, that I advertise DaniWeb with Google AdWords ... always spending nearly half of the profit made the previous month. Of course, I didn't foresee the $2,500 campaign being canceled, AdSense paying less, nor the canceling of the text ads. For that reason, I ended up just breaking even. However, when you guys had asked me to cut out two of the high paying banner campaigns, I ended up spending more than I was making for two days in a row. By adding the extra advertisement to the forum display pages, the extra inventory made up for canceling the banner campaigns, and now we're once again making more than we're spending. So in other words, we were never in the red at the end of a billing cycle. Make sense? :)
Just for the record .I wouldn't pay a monthly fee to belong to any site that I go to .Especially one where I contribute so many Hrs' of my time to help the people who come there looking for help !!:(
If the internet got lost in Cyber Space I would have more fee time .LOL
I actually have no problem with paying a monthly fee to certain sites, depending upon what they are. For example, I have purchased a membership subscription to digitalblasphemy.com in the past, a site that offers high quality 3D wallpaper. Their premium (paying) members are the only ones who can get access to widescreen and dual-monitor wallpaper, which is very rare to find. (And I'm very proud of my cinema displays!) I don't think I would pay for a support site though, such as experts-exchange or daniweb. However, I am seriously considering purchasing a subscription to webmasterworld.com. It is also around $10/month, but their premium members-only section is made up of a lot of experienced, well-respected webmasters, and really does offer a lot of very good information - and I like the site enough to be willing to donate to it.
As Dani notices the revenue from each individual ad has plumetted in recent years. This is a global phenomenon that all sites have to deal with.
Many ads that used to bring 10 cents per view now bring only 0.1 cent per clickthrough or worse 1 cent or less per successful transaction resulting from a clickthrough.
As the rate of views to clickthroughs is something like a thousand to one at best and the rate of transactions to clickthroughs is several hundred to one at best you can calculate for yourself what this does to ad revenue.
As to paying for sites. I currently have paid subscriptions to 2 sites, each costing me about $50 a year. In addition I do volunteer work for several more (effectively paying with time I spend to help them so they don't have to hire someone).
There's some more sites I would donate to if only they had a payment mechanism that doesn't rely on PayPal or IMOs.
why don't you guys just use all google ads?
because the revenue from them is quite low...
And also because Google isn't known to be very good at paying.
One day of over average clickthroughs and they often cancel all payouts claiming you were using a script to generate traffic. No defense, no nothing, you just loose out and they win.
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