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Advertising Update

As you may have noticed I've been playing a bit with different ad layouts recently. Unfortunately ad revenue has been dropping steadily over the past few months, from over 10$ to now approaching 1$ per day. This is not due to a decrease in site traffic or even a decrease in ad 'clicks' but solely from a large drop in average revenue per click. While I don't expect to get rich from ad revenue it would be nice if it could at least break even so I'll be playing with ad settings and see if anything makes a difference. 

I'm still being cautious about where the ads will appear and as usual I'm open to comments/suggestions from anyone. I still would do not want ads to be too obtrusive. There probably would be a significant gain in placing ads at the top of the page or within articles which I won't do even if I can't break even with other layouts. I might be able to live with an ad unit on the top-left side but am worried that it would eat too much space on users with small monitors (I use large/widescreen monitors but 33% of visitors use a 1024x768 resolution size so the site has to work well at that resolution).

Another option is to try something other than Google Adsense but we'll see how the tweaking goes before considering that. 

And just in case someone wonders...no, the site nor I are running out of money I'm just thinking longer term. With a site this size we really should be running on multiple/bigger servers (as you might tell by recent performance) and a more stable ad revenue would help. 

PS: My home computer 'died' last night so it might be a few days until I'm back up reliably, depending on what the problem is. -- Daveh 13:25, 16 January 2008 (EST)

:Unless Google is dropping ad revenue across the board, I imagine that the problem is that ad clicks here are not resulting in end purchases -- hence the drop in revenue. If this is the case, it is likely an intrinsic limitation on the workability of ads on the site -- people who come here for information are very unlikely to click through and purchase the end product. --Wrye 16:31, 16 January 2008 (EST)

:: AFAIK Google Adsense pays by the click or per 1000 ads displayed as decided by the advertiser. I think the Google referral program might work by 'end purchases' but I'm not currently using that. You (well, I) can see this by looking at the ad stats. Daily views have gone up slightly over the past few months while the number of clicks has gone down slightly. The big change, however, is the amount Google has paid for each click which has dropped, probably simply due to a lack of revelant advertisers.

::My main goal is to try and balance revenue with the number/size/placement of ads. Too few or the wrong ones and it's just not worth it. Too many or in the wrong place and it ruins the site. -- Daveh 18:24, 16 January 2008 (EST)

:Okay, I've been dealing with the ads for a while tonight while working on Cobl related pages, and I gotta say, '''I hate 'em. A busy color ad is tolerable, but a moving image is just extremely distracting and annoying. Page loads have also been hanging a lot (though that might be related to adding new pages, which always seems to drag down the ad server as it tries to figure out what ad to stick on a page it never heard of before). Anyway, this engendered a visit to my "Site Preferences" tab in Opera. Which makes me wonder if the more aggressive ads are actually self-defeating -- since the only way to get rid of them is remove them completely (no inline frames).

:OTOH, of course, breaking even is good. Some suggestions/thoughts:
:* I imagine that game companies lay out big bucks for advertising in the months leading up to Christmas, and then drastically tighten the belt at the beginning of the New Year. In other words, advertising should pick up later -- especially late in the year, and that may cover losses earlier in the year. (Hmm... But you said it had been dropping for "several months. So I may be totally off base on that one.)
:* The intellisense ads are notoriously not intelligent. Essentially, what we should see advertised here are ads for games, esp. ads for RPGs that compete'' with Bethsoft. Isn't there someway to direct the adserver to do that? (Instead of linking to useless stuff that happens to share a word with the current page topic?)
:--Wrye 02:26, 17 January 2008 (EST)

::Looking at the image ads that are being displayed it seems that most of them are more game oriented. Adsense is 'dumb' in the sense that it looks at the current page and tries to figure out the best ad to display. I thought I could narrow down the ad categories but it seems like the options are pretty narrow (blacklist or whitelist a specific site). There's nothing to say "show only game/RPG ads" unfortunately. Looking at the numbers from the past day is encouraging and we should be able to break even. I'll have to let it run a few weeks to get a good average though. -- Daveh 11:35, 17 January 2008 (EST)

Forgot to mention it earlier, but if anyone notices a 'bad' ad, either annoying (e.g., blinking) or inappropriate just note the ad link and let me know. I can easily blacklist certain ads. I haven't noticed any yet myself but I know I've seen some on other sites. -- Daveh 14:31, 18 January 2008 (EST)

:I haven't noticed anything annoying so far. They are all quite harmless. Surprising thing is that most of the ads I am seeing are completely unrelated to games like Naukri.com, MonsterIndia.com, Intel, ICICI and such things. --Mankar Camoran  15:07, 18 January 2008 (EST)

::Yah, it depends on the page and what Google 'thinks' it is about. On some pages I get game oriented ads and on others (like the main page or recent changes) I typically get the general type of ads you mention. -- Daveh 16:10, 18 January 2008 (EST)

:::I did notice some game related ads, although general ads are more. But I haven't been looking at many articles lately (I have stopped playing Oblivion completely for some reason), which may explain why I haven't seen many of them. --Mankar Camoran  08:07, 19 January 2008 (EST)

I noticed a very annoying ad; it's flashing neon pink and purple with scrolling names. It links to perfectmatch4u.com.  --GuildKnight  22:37, 1 February 2008 (EST)