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Ad System Complaints (Was: Coming Soon: Ads)

Hey all, I just wanted to inform everyone that we here on Bronibooru are about to phase in a new advertising system.

Yes, I know you might be concerned because, up until now, Bronibooru has been running ad-free, but all good things must come to an end, especially given how popular Bronibooru has become. In the interest of keeping Bronibooru free to the general public, however, I need money to keep it up and running, and that means that I need to turn to ads to keep the lights on, since, for a number of reasons, I cannot accept donations.

Rest assured though, the ads you will soon see will neither be obtrusive nor useless Google ads. In the interest of keeping you guys looking at them, and keeping Bronibooru a uniquely awesome site, we will be running our own advertising system independent from any others (much like Something Awful's ads).

This will allow us to not only engage the community by allowing YOU to make the ads, but it will also ensure that we at Bronibooru can tailor the ads that display TO YOU GUYS, keeping in line with our policies such as the Creepy Rule, Warez, and so on. (Besides, who here wants to learn that yet another single Mom in your city lost 100 pounds on Acai Berry supplements?)

With luck, adding these ads can also ensure that Bronibooru has the resources to keep serving everyone with the images you've grown to enjoy for years to come!

Some technical details (as far as I recall the IRC discussion):

  • Probably not custom iframes
  • Flash only after special agreement with cosmo
  • Links will be redirected to track clicks

(Besides, who here wants to learn that yet another single Mom in your city lost 100 pounds on Acai Berry supplements?)

:allears:

Seriously though, this sounds great and I can't wait to see how it works out.

henke37 said:
Some technical details (as far as I recall the IRC discussion):

  • Probably not custom iframes
  • Flash only after special agreement with cosmo
  • Links will be redirected to track clicks
  • The ads should be embedded into the page. No Javascript should be needed.
  • Flash is nominally supported by the system currently. Whether or not it's actually implemented will have to wait, in part because I don't really want to have Flash ads unless there's a good reason.
  • Impressions and clicks will be counted for statistical purposes so that advertisers might have the opportunity to see how their ad campaigns are doing. No additional information is collected with respect to tracking visitors beyond what is collected simply as a result of running a web server [1] (it's not like we're adding extra cookies for ads, and I have no intent on opening up your user profiles or usage information to advertisers).

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#combined

Not to mention how important it is to know how much to charge advertisers if they opt for a "pay per click" deal.

But there is still something I wonder about, what will the exact location and sizes be? Content authors need to know.

I am currently thinking it will be a single 468x60 banner image above the content, like on Safebooru (ignoring the one below the content): http://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list

Why not below?

If we're going to have ads, I'm not going to cheat the people who actually intend on using them for advertising by hiding the ads in places people won't look!

I support the ads idea.

edit: I love the new ads.

Is it possible to see all the ads currently running at once, like SA?

It's on the agenda.

Westy543 said:
Is it possible to see all the ads currently running at once, like SA?

It is now: https://www.mlponies.com/buysomeapples/list_all.php

It shows one of the ads twice.

Doesn't for me. Ads will show up multiple times if they were bought for multiple slots on the "list all" page.

That's the point. The number of slots shouldn't count there.

henke37 said:
That's the point. The number of slots shouldn't count there.

Why not? Every ad occupies its own slot, doesn't matter if it's the same ad. It's paid for and displayed independently.

It is redundant information. It is also not what was requested. The page is supposed to list the ads for the current month. Not the contents of the slots for the current month.

henke37 said:
It is redundant information. It is also not what was requested. The page is supposed to list the ads for the current month. Not the contents of the slots for the current month.

Does it really bug you that much?

Something Awful, whose ad system I've modelled the Ponygoons Ad System after, does the same thing:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/adlist.php

It is 100% intended and not a bug. It's not redundant information as it tells you the frequency with which an ad will pop up as well.

In a rather useless way I might add. Imagine the slots being worth much less due to inflation. Like say, a hundred slots for a ten per cent chance of being shown. Then this would scale horribly. Frequencies would best be described as a number, not by repetition.

Nobody's buying a hundred slots. And if they are, they deserve the room they get in the ad display page.

It's not really that big an issue, bro.