Forum Moderators: open
Personaly, The ads don't bother me, I am happy to see Brett monetizing the site.
There were people here today clearly encouraging mayhem
HEY! I resemble that remark but my mayhem was more covert such as suggesting it stays this way so I can site target in a month when it could be really useful ;)
Dude, if you had any sense of entrepreneurship you would be doing site targeted ads on WebmasterWorld today...
Hehe. I was wondering how long it would take before someone else's ads started showing up.
I noticed AdSense up last night around 9:20 PM and jumped onto AdWords right away. Took a few hours before our BOTW ads kicked in, though.
;) Y
Brings up an interesting point though SteveWh - what do you do in forums where nicknames are used and no one knows who the website (or adsense act holder) really is?
Consider the intent of the AdSense rules. Google wants AdSense clicks to be from people who are interested in seeing the site that an ad goes to. They don't want webmasters to turn clicks into an end in themselves, either by their own actions or by engaging confederates.
If your own actions create a pattern of "non-abuse" of the intent of those rules, you'll probably be in the clear, and even if Google calls something into question, your conscience is clear, you can correct any error, and you'd likely have a defensible position.
There are many posts (not all) in these forums made by people who were clearly trying to push the line of the AS TOS and got caught. AS TOS has a clause saying you "May not encourage users to click the Google ads by using phrases such as "click the ads," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language". NOW they have a clause, "May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks". Why? Because someone ignored the intent and took the position of, "Well you didn't say I couldn't do THAT." That's nonsense. If the preponderance of your actions looks legitimate to Google, I'd expect them to be reasonable. If you look like someone who is going to try to violate the TOS intent at every turn without technically stepping over the explicit limits, I'd expect them to be unforgiving.
In other words, try to handle situations responsibly (as seen by Google), and thus you will also look like someone who is handling situations responsibly. Removing posts that you believe violate the TOS, whether they do or not, would be such an action. It shows effort. (I'm uncertain whether someone else's posts really can ever expose you to a TOS-violation charge, unless Google suspects a "confederacy" involving you.)
There were people here today clearly encouraging mayhem
Oh well, you opt for CPM anyway.
The practically nil clickthrough rate on this particular category where as AdSense publishers we avoid clicking on AdSense ads
Do you?
I'm more than happy - as an adsense publisher - to see both Adsense AND other publishers do well.
As it happens, I rarely even notice adsense ads, let alone ones that interest me - I think we publishers get immune quicker than most - But that's another story; I don't 'avoid' clicking, I just don't 'see' them!
Don't know if anyone else mentioned this, but WW might monetize much better displaying ads only to non logged in members.
Also not nice deleting people's posts, then discussing and quoting them later on, mess with the bull you get the horns.
Mission:
This site is a service to the web site administrator community. We are here for WebmasterWorld members to discuss the process of doing business on the internet. Running a website takes a great deal of knowledge. The design, coding, maintenance, promotion, marketing, and management of a website is almost an impossible task for one person alone without extensive training. We are here as a forum for the members to share and gain knowledge in operating and promoting a website. Think of us as part of your extended site development and process team.We are not here to actually do business with one another.
We do not accept advertising at this time.
Shouldn't this be updated now april fools is over?
Anyway. happy to see ^_^
Webmasters frequent this site to share and learn and find out how to monetize their sites and make more money. Why then, would anyone trying to monetize their own site object to the site they're frequenting, to find help for themselves, being monetized to support the costs?
Who is supposed to carry the cost and foot the bills of running the site that's helping them? Is it supposed to be a "free lunch," a privately funded webmaster charity?
Maybe it's an entitlements [google.com] program, is that it? Webmaster public assistance, with food stamps and free software vouchers when you reach 5K posts? If so, where's mine?
Maybe someone can explain it, since I can't figure out what kind of narcissistic logic is behind the reasoning.
[edited by: Marcia at 10:38 am (utc) on April 2, 2007]
As to your other point about charity it was a mistake that we didn't know about and was corrected as soon as it was known. It will include all income from the site for yesterday (including subscriptions and donations). Unfortunately, there were some that thought it was proof of a grand google conspiracy. They called in Scully...
> mayhem
Not you at all bill. You missed the other stuff.
> Shouldn't this be updated now april fools is over?
How should we word it?
"We also have fun from time to time".
> test
Well, there were problems with it being a real test.
- sunday (lowest historical day of the week)
- It was april 1 a notoriously slow day on the web.
- It was one of the first warm sundays in the south (people out side).
- Yesterday was the lowest uniques we have seen since july of last year.
- Ads were not on the high volume pages such as the forum index list [webmasterworld.com] and the subforum index lists [webmasterworld.com] - and certainly not the mega active list [webmasterworld.com]. eg: adsense was on less than 30% of the site. However, the real shock to me was seeing how low the total number of ads served were - less than 20% of the total page views yesterday. The rest were mentioned above and the final big chunk was apparently -- you guessed it -- f'in bots.
Results were mixed. They were more than I had bet a friend they would be and about half what I was expecting them to be. Weird? Not really. I didn't have a lot of faith in the ads, but was willing to be wrong about it.
It is doubtful you will see that type of advertising on WebmasterWorld anytime soon. Not to say we discount it, just to say, things are ok. Will try to write something about it yet this week and dump it in the blog [webmasterworld.com].
Many people hold the forum and its moderators in great respect, and as such there is a responsibility towards them and especially for newbs, who could go and copy the clicks for charity model and end up in trouble for it, I think admitting wrong doing there is not too much to ask and much better than moderating those views out.
Personally, my objections are more cosmetic, but I feel like no one is standing out for those that spoke their heart out and are getting mauled for it.
[added:]
As to your other point about charity it was a mistake that we didn't know about and was corrected as soon as it was known
The above was added after I posted so I think it deserves highlighting.
[edited by: Hobbs at 1:05 pm (utc) on April 2, 2007]
Hey what's up with all these links to robots.txt? Seen them all over the web. Will someone sticky me w/ the skinny please :)
Thanks.
Especially if they are negotiated directly with BT and don't make any of the various SE reps uncomfortable when they visit www.
One of the great things about www is that we can occassionally chat to SE reps on neutral ground
Not only should you keep AdSense on WebmasterWorld, but allow posters to get 50% of the rotation for threads they started
Great idea! ... only if applied retroactively from yesterday
if we were being paid to open new threads, tomorrow 0.1% of our bretheren would be spamming up 99% of the forum with crapola for the $0.0001 they'd get from each post
you know it's true
But, sorry Brett, it ain't funny.
- adding a bunch of cpm banner ads where we titled them "please click our ads" and other line-by-line tos breakers.
- naming shoe as the next pubcon keynoter.
- replacing the homepage with the sequoia capital homepage.
- replacing the homepage with the google homepage.
- going css, going phpbb, adding a chat room.
- breaking out the c64 and running colorBBS for a day.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:25 pm (utc) on April 2, 2007]
Brett, I replied to your sticky, no hard feelings.
<added>
#2 would have been far better with the only downside being the links it would generate for that best friend of yours :)
A long time ago I remember a DOS program that blanked screens and then displayed messages like:
Formatting C:
small pause
Drive formatted
Please insert boot disk
Or
Deleting files:
C:/Windows/windows.exe
C:/Windows/system.ini
C:/IO.sys
...
Not everybody laughed.
A long time ago I remember a DOS program that blanked screens and then displayed messages like:
I wrote one worse than that, and it said nothing to the user.
Every time you rebooted it inverted the FAT on C: so every other boot the C drive went away.
This was only funny because I was working in a hard disk company at the time and we just brought out a new controller card and, as you can imagine, the engineer that got this toy of mine installed on his system about had a heart attack.
I let him off the hook after about 10 minutes as I was having a hard time not to LOL at the poor guy rebooting over and over and watching the C: drive vanish and then re-appear.
I'm a bad boy ;)
However, my favorite was my random screen error driver for MSDOS I wrote that for someone with the filthiest computer I had ever seen. Periodically it displayed "Error writing dirty screen, Abort, Retry, Ignore?". I fell off my chair laughing when I saw him heading back to his desk 2 hours later with Windex and a towel mumbling "I don't know how it can tell, but this can't hurt..."
I once setup a new support engineer's Mac to overwrite his name whenever he types it in any program with the name of the boss he hated, it drove him crazy, the funniest was when I started to remotely chat with him inside his word processor window (long before the internet was popular) and convinced him that I am an intelligent new kind of virus, you should have seen his pale face running to my office like he'd seen a ghost!
[edited by: Hobbs at 5:28 pm (utc) on April 2, 2007]
Yeah... the layout wasn't pleasing to the eye, and it wasn't the norm... but did anyone honestly think that this was nothing more than an April Fool's joke and/or perhaps a test of the waters?
Even if Brett did choose to display ads... it's his site, and as a paying supporter it doesn't bother me in the least if the 'norm' is changed every now and then.
Peter
I think non-paying members should either pay for membership or stop complaining about ads on the site. Talk with your wallets and pay for the privilege of being a member or keep quiet about it.
I'm sure WebmasterWorld costs quite a bit to keep online and it's not a charity.
It either needs paid memberships or advertising to stay afloat.
I'm a paid member.
'Nuff said.
P.S. Even as a paid member I don't mind seeing ads as I don't mind keeping up with new products in the market. Those that bury their heads in the sand with ad blockers will be left behind in the dust when the next big thing hits because they simply won't see it and I'll be laughing all the way to the bank while they smugly smirk about not seeing ads.
