Re-introduction of Banner Ads

TheChrisD

Boards.ie: Neil wrote: »

you can also choose to turn off the ads too.

However, unlike the ability to turn off signatures, the ability to turn off ads doesn't come for free (barring browser extensions).

quarryman

eth0 wrote: »

Well feck it lads and I hate to say it but this could be the beginning of the end, as it often is once a Web 2.0 site starts to put the 'squeeze' on its userbase by increasing the invasiveness of ads.

I don't see them of course and I realise boards now has investors to pay off and its no longer a humble little site run off DeV's home broadband connection and a second hand embedded development board with a CompactFlash card but the grim reality is that this sort of stuff rarely ends well.

+1

Danny's smug responses to how people should just cough up subscription fees and if some users try to use a different skin they'll implement the ads there quicker.... that says it all really.

I've used plenty of sites that attempted to squeeze cash out of its users and they fell apart, digg.com being a good example. Once people feel they're being monetized they'll walk away, happens every time.

Boards.ie: Neil wrote: »

you can also choose to turn off the ads too.

How? And don't say "by paying a subscription fee".

quarryman

Overheal wrote: »

I can think of things worse: news sites regularly play flash ads that hover directly over their articles, and you normally have to sit through them before they will choose to vanish and let you read what you wanted to in the first place.

By comparison banner adds in the thread is only about as annoying as some people's signatures. Tolerable evil.

News sites are not the same as message boards. Content on boards.ie is completely user generated, zero cost.

Nobody asked for extra skins, features, competitions, community managers. Why does a message board even need a team of full time paid staff anyway?

I had asked earlier for a business decision behind the increased advertising. Where is the money suddenly needed? Staff wages? Increased server costs? Increased RoI for the investors? What's the breakdown?

By the way, I know boards is a private enterprise, they don't have to share this info. But the site was created, populated and moderated by its users from day one. A little transparency to them would go a long way.

minidazzler

quarryman wrote: »

+1

Danny's smug responses to how people should just cough up subscription fees and if some users try to use a different skin they'll implement the ads there quicker.... that says it all really.

I've used plenty of sites that attempted to squeeze cash out of its users and they fell apart, digg.com being a good example. Once people feel they're being monetized they'll walk away, happens every time.

How? And don't say "by paying a subscription fee".

They aren't trying to squeeze cash out of users. They are trying to make some money from it's userbase. Not specifically from users themselves.

There are more self-entitled people here than I would have though. Thank fook it's not even close to the majority, just a bunch of nit-pickers who think they deserve everything on a platter and shouldn't have to skip over a few measly ads.

Overheal

quarryman wrote: »

Why does a message board even need a team of full time paid staff anyway?

You've been here longer than me, and you know the growth has been organic. What starts as a hobby humming under someone's bed suddenly gets over a million impressions a month and needs to expand, increasing the cost and the amount of personal time investment to keep it operating. Boards was a part time hobby for years, and you know this. It was a long, long time before it became a full time job for people. The need for that grew from how complicated the system was getting, because of how popular boards got. A lot of those improvements you speak of also came from the hobbyist standpoint of it. I'm sure it would run "just splendid" on some canned API but it wouldn't give the site nearly the same feel, and it wouldn't be moderated by volunteers at all in the same manner, which are another reason the site has done so well.

I could easily let Dav tell you some of the things the FT staff deal with, and some of the bizarre episodes they've encountered as a direct consequence of the site being up and running. Not the least of which is a slew of daily drole you and I don't hear about, like legal threats and subpoenas and everything in between. You also recall well that the site's been hacked at least on one occasion. That's just some of the crap that goes on, in between the subtle improvements to the site - do you remember "the 3AM Backup?"

There have been dozens of points in the last few years where the site could have just as easily wound-up and we'd all look somewhere else to spend/waste time online. Fact is though the FT and the invested parties have an interest in keeping the site running, such as it is and such as they do. In contrast, any user (and many, many users have chosen to) can just as easily say "I've had enough of this pseudodrama" and walk away for themselves.

quarryman

Thanks Overheal. I'm genuinely interested in this. I wouldn't be so vocal on the subject if I wasn't such a regular user all these years.

Great things have been done to improve stability. I remember the 3am backups, eugh. I also remember the random downtime and terrible search. Both have been solved.

I love boards.ie, I just don't want to see it going down a road that so many other sites have and not end well. Advertising has crept in more and more here over the years and I'd hate to see it damage all the things that have been done right.

Do-more

Huge problem with page load times for me today because of a huge lag in serving the ads.

Boards.ie: Neil

TheChrisD wrote: »

However, unlike the ability to turn off signatures, the ability to turn off ads doesn't come for free (barring browser extensions).

There's still a choice though, whether or not it was free was never mentioned by either of us.

quarryman wrote: »

How? And don't say "by paying a subscription fee".

It's one way for sure, there are others. I like to make the comparison between boards and downloading of music. I actually don't download any music be it "free" or paid-for download ala iTunes etc. If I love the music I'll go to buy it from a source closest to the band, which may be the band themselves or from an indie shop so that I know my money is going into good hands. I'm supporting a community when I do this.

Similar with boards, I have the option right now, to go into both my work and personal account and switch off the ads, there's a few reasons why I don't mainly they really aren't that intrusive at all. There are far worse sites out there but sure they have to do what they have to do to survive.

quarryman wrote: »

Why does a message board even need a team of full time paid staff anyway?

Overheal pretty much got this in one, but I'll add a few points.

1. Without community managers this place would have been resting with the Titanic years ago. Community managers have the experience and the training to sort out when discussions cross the line between a heated debate and flat out name calling, bickering, bullying etc that goes on here. You may not see it, but it's there. That's not all they do, every day I look over at Dav's desk, where he has a pc tower on his desk there's a stack of paper that protrudes over the top of this, this is the stack of legal notices, takedown notices, defamation notices, slander notices that always gets bigger (never have I once seen it lower than his pc tower). They also help out the admin team, the cmod team and the mod team to make this place a great community.

2. The site as it stands today takes an enormous amount of work. Have a look at this blog post Ross made two years ago - http://blog.boards.ie/2010/05/27/cleaning-up-a-few-years-of-incremental-infrastructure-growth/ since then we've added a **** load more, boards currently runs 4 database machines, 3 search machines, 1 utilities/monitor machine, and approximately 8 web servers that handle the traffic. 16 machines power a site that in its inception lived under the desk of John Breslin (Cloud). These required a lot of money to buy, let alone feed them 24/7 power and bandwidth. Getting the site to a stage where we can add the new features that people request in the Site Development forum takes it's time (God damn you vBulletin). It actually irks me when someone suggests something great and new to do, we all want to do it but vBulletin blocks us due to its legacy issues. We're working on removing all of vBulletin bar it's core but it's a painstakingly slow process.

3. The community is really what makes this place tick, I've been a regular boards user since I was 13 I'm now 26, what I love here is the collective community as a whole and the little micro communities that spawned here and the things they do outside of boards, for example the boards.ie soccer team, the cyclists who have boards.ie branded gear, the all around Ireland trips the motoring forum do for charity all these things and more are ****ing awesome all we want to do in the office is get these great things publicised more and above all keep these sorts of things going and spawning new ones.

Oh and hat tip on the 3am backups, I've - like many people here - lost many of a long post (just like this one) to the 3am backup, well not anymore*. Also not to mention boards.ie members aren't just in Ireland so a 3am backup was peak time for Americans and during the bleedin' day down in Oz.

*It's rare that i'm up at 3am anymore, being a software developer you start to appreciate sleep a hell of a lot more as opposed to when I was a student bum eating a koka noodle whilst replying in the nocturnal forum :pac:

minidazzler

quarryman wrote: »

Thanks Overheal. I'm genuinely interested in this. I wouldn't be so vocal on the subject if I wasn't such a regular user all these years.

Great things have been done to improve stability. I remember the 3am backups, eugh. I also remember the random downtime and terrible search. Both have been solved.

I love boards.ie, I just don't want to see it going down a road that so many other sites have and not end well. Advertising has crept in more and more here over the years and I'd hate to see it damage all the things that have been done right.

I don't find the ads that intrusive. Do you not have an internal noise filter that allows you to drown out things you don't wanna see? Maybe I see fewer ads because I'm on 40 ppPg, but I know where they are so I scroll a tiny bit faster over them. Just by seeing them the site gets revenue.

People think monetizing the site is gonna kill the community. It's been monetized for a while now, I went to a beers 2 weeks ago and had a great time.

Before the beers I called into a bar where one of my favourite boardsies works because I've talked to him a long time on boards and wanted to meet him IRL, he's a gent. The community isn't dead, it's evolving and expanding.

The biggest problem with that is you get the "facebook retards" who anytime something changes on facebook complain, coming onto boards and doing the same. As if change is a bad thing!

Do-more wrote: »

Huge problem with page load times for me today because of a huge lag in serving the ads.

You THINK it's because of ads, but unless it's happening a bunch of people the problem is on your end.

Overheal

every day I look over at Dav's desk, where he has a pc tower on his desk there's a stack of paper that protrudes over the top of this, this is the stack of legal notices, takedown notices, defamation notices, slander notices that always gets bigger (never have I once seen it lower than his pc tower). They also help out the admin team, the cmod team and the mod team to make this place a great community.

He needs an All in One. Dav, you need an All in One. Preorder one of those new 23" Envy's

Sarky

So, has the website imploded yet? Because it's been a while since this thread began, and anyone who prophesied doom and mass desertions seems to be still here...

minidazzler

Sarky wrote: »

So, has the website imploded yet? Because it's been a while since this thread began, and anyone who prophesied doom and mass desertions seems to be still here...

Have you not noticed that the community has died and that AH is filled with people insulting each other using creative means to avoid bans? :pac:

Faith

Ah lads, I'm now getting nearly full screen ads in the middle of threads on touch, along with at the bottom of threads. This is too much. There's NO need for them to be so big. I'll get over ads as long as they're not breaking the flow of the thread too much, but this is ridiculous. I've seen the post in Site Dev that says why it is, but it's still horrible. Nobody has addressed the question that was asked so many times - do the ads on the touch site need to be so f*cking big when it's all about impressions and not clicks anyway?

mike65

Do-more wrote: »

Huge problem with page load times for me today because of a huge lag in serving the ads.

minidazzler wrote: »

You THINK it's because of ads, but unless it's happening a bunch of people the problem is on your end.

I've got most of them zapped but in the past some flash based ads have caused severe slow down for me and others.

Doc Ruby

Adverts: make them relevant to the users. Have an advert category in the control panel where people can choose the advert types they want. Also make them relevant to the forums they are shown in. I don't want to see ads for whatever hey-fiddle-diddle you kids are into these days in the Survivalism forum, but I'd appreciate some redflare adverts or cold steel. Yes, I'm on these peoples' mailing lists, consider remailing. Also it should be simple to show ads based on forum most frequented even when users aren't in that forum.

On that note, cut out the middle man and get a sales rep hooking up businesses with boards for a direct commission, make that part of the upgrades. Local businesses and relevant websites. These advert serving groups also make it much easier for adblocker to nix their offerings, so two birds with the one stone if you serve up the ads yourself.

I dunno I used to give a few bob towards boards, but then I realised it had no positive feedback mechanism. I've had more thanks than posts for as long as I've posted here, but go berserk at a few racists in AH and its a downward death spiral. Meh.

Doc Ruby

seamus wrote: »

That's just plain unreasonable.

How else do you propose boards funds its activities?

Ramp up the classifieds section to compete with donedeal, those guys are making a mint, millions. Set up a business directory. Build your own browsergames/apps. Think about a local bands, artists and writers platform too, Ireland is famous for that stuff, anywhere anyone is making money on the web boards should stick its oar in. Jump on the looming 3D modelling craze, open source it, connect independent authors with freelance editors and proofreaders. Set up a best of boards youtube channel, split the revenue with the video maker. Sell hotel rooms, hustle those million pageviews a month, sell photographs, get creative.

Farming out adverts to stock advertising agencies, no wonder the place is hard up for cash.

Morag

Doc Ruby wrote: »

Ramp up the classifieds section to compete with donedeal, those guys are making a mint, millions. Set up a business directory. Build your own browsergames/apps. Think about a local bands, artists and writers platform too, Ireland is famous for that stuff, anywhere anyone is making money on the web boards should stick its oar in. Jump on the looming 3D modelling craze, open source it, connect independent authors with freelance editors and proofreaders. Set up a best of boards youtube channel, split the revenue with the video maker. Sell hotel rooms, hustle those million pageviews a month, sell photographs, get creative.

Farming out adverts to stock advertising agencies, no wonder the place is hard up for cash.

All of that takes time and paying people to it.

Doc Ruby

Sharrow wrote: »

All of that takes time and paying people to it.

If they don't pay for themselves and everything else, you're doing it wrong. Seriously the hardest part by FAR about any of these web services is getting an audience. And here you are with the ear of half the country, as long as ye don't make a haymes of the implementation its not difficult. At a minimum if you want to hang your hat on adverts at least realise how your bread is buttered and make a decent job of it. Advertising agencies are just lazy.

Rabies

Faith wrote: »

Ah lads, I'm now getting nearly full screen ads in the middle of threads on touch, along with at the bottom of threads. This is too much. There's NO need for them to be so big. I'll get over ads as long as they're not breaking the flow of the thread too much, but this is ridiculous. I've seen the post in Site Dev that says why it is, but it's still horrible. Nobody has addressed the question that was asked so many times - do the ads on the touch site need to be so f*cking big when it's all about impressions and not clicks anyway?

I feel the same.
All good with them on the main site. I can ignore them easier. But on the touch site it really does break the flow.
Would text only adverts be better, or is the hit rate massively less of these?

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

anncoates

I'm fine with the concept of ads on the site but as others have said, the sheer size of the adverts - and now some are animated! - on the touch screen really jars the browsing experience.

It might even be better just to make (a smaller) subscription mandatory and have it done with than a policy that seems to be basically incrementally upping the ad content until users end up subscribing out of desperation.

Another thing I noticed since the big adverts came in at the bottom of the touch screens is that when I fire up a reply box and start typing, the keyboard (stock keyboard on HTC One X) often drops away briefly meaning I sometimes inadvertently click through the ad. I only noticed this happening since the bottom adverts came in? Is it something to do with them in some way?

minidazzler

anncoates wrote: »

It might even be better just to make (a smaller) subscription mandatory and have it done with than a policy that seems to be basically incrementally upping the ad content until users end up subscribing out of desperation.

That wouldn't make people subscribe, it would make them leave. Especially a mandatory subscription.

Fuzzy_Dunlop

I'm sorry but the ads on the touch site are absolutely ridiculous! There's no need for them to be that big or intrusive.

Adblock plus added a new feature recently which only blocks the more intrusive ads in order to encourage sites to use more reasonable measures.

A good example of how this could go is to look at digg vs reddit.

RoundyMooney

Yeah, I've ditched the touch site as well. For now at least.

(Ironically, when it comes to animated ads, one of the worst offenders is for thejournal. I've given up on that as well, thanks to the ingeniously invasive Meteor popup that appears, every time I open the app.)

Bit of an unfortunate pattern. One would hope it isn't a sign of things to come from Distilled Media. The usual disclaimers about knowing that the bills have to be paid apply.

Dav

I just want to right a couple of wrongs I've seen posted.

1) Ramp up our Classified Ads - we did that several years ago and it's now called Adverts.ie. It became so big that it's now a separate company. We're not going to start competing with ourselves by trying to re-do classified adverts here on Boards (again).

2) Dedicated sales team - there are 5 people on the Distilled sales team who are tasked with getting ads in for the entire group. It's easier to sell for 5 sites when you have a bigger range of "target demographics." One of them (Rebecca) is dedicated to Talk To forums for Boards.ie. The nature of the online ad/pr business in Ireland means you have to deal with agencies and can't talk to businesses directly. If we snubbed one agency by going directly to their client to sell ad space, suddenly they pull all their clients from the group and we're down several hundred thousand Euro. It's a most inconvenient means of doing business but that's how it works.

3) Touch Site ads - I agree there are too many and I'm trying to do something about it internally. I'm very much opposed to content being broken up by ads and I voiced my opposition to it when the first iteration of the touch site went live, but my say only goes so far and I don't have any involvement in the finances for the company. To expand further on how banner sales work though, it's not just about impressions though, clicks on ads make us more money because we can say that a campaign had X% of a click-through rate which makes us a more inviting prospect for an agency with money to spend.

4) Scale - people don't seem to get that this is a big website and has big costs. Wages are a part of that, yes, but without a Tech team to run the servers and a Community team to make sure the Mods and Admins have the tools they need as well as keeping us out of court and a Sales team to pay the bills, the site wouldn't be here. It's not that long ago (circa 2007) since the site was completely unusable during peak hours because there were nowhere near enough resources to manage the demands and that was when we were pushing out less than half the monthly impressions we currently serve.

5) VBulletin - we can't even do a simple thing like changing a member's username because VBulletin is so poorly optimised for something the size of Boards. "Well change to something else" is the obvious response but if it were that easy, we'd have done it years ago. Conor and Ross started the long and arduous task of moving us away from VBulletin by creating a new API that all new projects use and there is no quick way to speed that process up - unless someone has a team of 50 software developers they'd like to give us for free for 12 months

Corkfeen

There, set adblock to allow ads for boards. You sometimes forget how the most innocuous extensions can have consequences for others. I shall subscribe again when I have the cash.

Doc Ruby

Dav wrote: »

2) Dedicated sales team - there are 5 people on the Distilled sales team who are tasked with getting ads in for the entire group. It's easier to sell for 5 sites when you have a bigger range of "target demographics." One of them (Rebecca) is dedicated to Talk To forums for Boards.ie. The nature of the online ad/pr business in Ireland means you have to deal with agencies and can't talk to businesses directly. If we snubbed one agency by going directly to their client to sell ad space, suddenly they pull all their clients from the group and we're down several hundred thousand Euro. It's a most inconvenient means of doing business but that's how it works.

1) Agencies only deal with a tiny percentage of all of the businesses in the country, and generally only a select segment of the largest.
2) As a result of which you're serving up adverts that don't have any interest for most of your users, and won't be of much use to the businesses paying for them. Its only a matter of time before these businesses realise that.
3) If you make ads relevant to the users there won't be any complaints. They'll even buy from the businesses who advertise rather than being part of a "branding" effort. The businesses win, boards wins by making more money, and the users win.

You most certainly can talk to businesses directly. Remember who has the product here, without boards and its like the ad agencies have nothing to sell, they are just middlemen using an outdated magazine model. And if you think they're averse to swiping customers from one another you're very much mistaken. Boards is an incredible resource from that point of view, you have many local users divided according to their own interests, that's 90% of your job done for you.

My advice again is to break up the advertising and take direct control of it. No need to go in at the deep end, pick a few sub forums to start out with and see how you get on, keep the agencies on the rest of the site. Take a page from the books of websites like weddings online, another site that's making a mint and looks after its own advertising. If it works out spread it to different forums.

Yes its nice and handy to only have a couple of reps to deal with, but its costing money and will eventually cost a lot more.

Dav

To be fair Doc, Distilled Media is the biggest online publishing group in Ireland, the people we have making these decisions are very good at their job and my limited knowledge of things doesn't even scratch the surface of what's involved. What inventory we don't "sell" gets taken up with Google ads which is why we sometimes have peculiar ads that we'd ordinarily never take on (and again, a big thank you to people who report them to us). I do have an idea around "community ads" that we're thinking about where we might sell inventory to members to appear on specific forums, but it's only at the ideas stage right now.

Small businesses also seem to think we're way over-charging for our inventory too, but wouldn't bat an eyelid at a quote of €10k for an add in the Times and we have a vastly bigger daily readership than they do. There's only so much we can do to try and get these smaller businesses on board, but the reality is they don't understand us (and those that already understand "internets" are probably managing their own Google ad campaigns) and so dealing with an agency that does is a far better use of the sales team's time. Your suggestion of breaking it up and taking direct control also means we need to hire one or two Sales people of our own which is a huge financial commitment and only ads to the monthly expenses.

There's one other thing about it (I'm I'm getting very off topic here), small businesses are more interested in trying to sue us rather than advertise with us because someone said something bad about them on a post 4 years ago when the owners son was having a bad day and was rude to a customer once... No company of any significant size sends us legal threats, it's always small businesses who don't seem to understand that you can tackle criticism head on and not threaten someone to make it disappear. 99% of the legal letters we get are this sort of thing.

Doc Ruby

Dav wrote: »

I do have an idea around "community ads" that we're thinking about where we might sell inventory to members to appear on specific forums, but it's only at the ideas stage right now.

That's a good start, definetely a step in the right direction.

Dav wrote: »

Small businesses also seem to think we're way over-charging for our inventory too, but wouldn't bat an eyelid at a quote of €10k for an add in the Times and we have a vastly bigger daily readership than they do.

That would be a sales and communication problem. You need a good presentation that clearly spells out your advantages over traditional media, in ten slides or less. You're up to your eyes in the facts every day, but that doesn't mean Sean SME has one clue about them, educating them is what will work to your advantage here.

Dav wrote: »

Your suggestion of breaking it up and taking direct control also means we need to hire one or two Sales people of our own which is a huge financial commitment and only ads to the monthly expenses.

This is a common mistake many businesspeople make.

Salespeople bring in their own wages and everyone else's.

If they aren't doing that, you're doing it wrong. Print it on a poster and hang it on the office wall, this is scripture.

Dav wrote: »

There's one other thing about it (I'm I'm getting very off topic here), small businesses are more interested in trying to sue us rather than advertise with us

I don't really understand this. I guess its about some halfassed perception that the internet is big money, and any internet company will settle before going to court. Again, communication.

catch.23

If ye want people to install adblock, ye're going the right way about it with animated advertisments.