Inq. of the Week: Webvertising

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Inq. of the Week: Webvertising

Written by The Game on Monday, 29 October 20078 Comments

Transformers! More than meets the eye. Transformers! Better than expected but still meh. Many of you felt it was pretty damn good too, so that sounds like a success overall. I watched it the night after the poll was posted, and found many, many flaws but was quite impressed by Shia LeBeouf. I can see why so many people liked it… and it definitely brought back some nostalgic memories. (As did The Incredible Changebots)

ChattyDM recently posted about his decision to pull GoogleAds from his blog, due to disappointing returns. Well, we sympathize for sure: GoogleAds was the first ad program I signed up for near the site’s inception. In the twoish years it’s been up, we’ve earned less than $30 in clicks. Granted, there was a lot of time when they had sub-optimal placement. I’ve always strived to make ads as unobstrusive as possible, since it bothers me when sites are more ads than content. Despite placing it at the bottom of every post and in the upper-right corner, no arrangement seemed to generate more clicks.

There was a period of time when we sold plenty of Amazon merchandise through our affiliate links, but that died off completely as well. Presently, I pulled the Amazon widget for causing too many load errors. It’ll return in some form using all the new tools after I get a chance to play around with them.

It was a few months ago when we were approved for Text Link Ads, which were recommended to us by GameProducer. Text Link Ads has been great, allowing us to finally operate in the black and put money both towards increasing our bandwidth to keep up with increased popularity and in spending it on contests. Unfortunately, according to David Airey and Yehuda, TLAs are causing some problems in search rankings due how the links work. I haven’t noticed a problem yet, but if we do lose search ranking, I’m not sure what we’ll do…

So anyway, this is a general question based on your surfing habits, as we try to make a decision that keeps us running and keeps you, the all-important reader, happy!

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Dave The Game is Dave Chalker, son of science fiction author Jack L. Chalker. In addition to being a semi-professional game designer Dave is the Editor-in-Chief of Critical Hits (which means he writes about everything.) Dave is also Executive Director of the RPG Bloggers Network. (Email Dave)

8 Comments »

Bartoneus said:

I would say the thing I hate to see most is when the top of a post is completely strangled by google ads, so that there is only about 2-3 words per line of the post and this huge ad. I have to struggle to get to the meat of the post where it is unimpeded by the ads.

- 29 October 2007 at 8:32 am

The Game (author) said:

That can be annoying, but my least favorite advertising method are the ones that automatically link keywords, and when you scroll over them pops up a small box with a product. Comic Book Resources uses those and it drives me crazy- I have to be very careful where I put my mouse.

- 29 October 2007 at 10:52 am

Bartoneus said:

Oh yea, those are the WORST! It actually actively impedes your view of the website content, which is obviously a bad thing and I can only imagine it earns a good amount of money or else I see no reason anyone would have them?

- 29 October 2007 at 1:04 pm

count_crackula said:

I read critical-hits entirely through the RSS feed with the exceptions of participating in polls and leaving comments, so I almost never see the ads. Maybe you could include an ad at the bottom of each RSS article?

- 29 October 2007 at 1:20 pm

The Game (author) said:

We signed up for “feedvertising” on TLA, but nobody’s bought them yet. It’s possible I’ll try to figure another way to do feed ads, or I’ll leave them alone.

Note: I’m not trying to guilt trip anybody to change their viewing habits or ad-clicking habits, I really do just want to know how people think

- 29 October 2007 at 4:15 pm

DarthCthulhu said:

“…my least favorite advertising method are the ones that automatically link keywords, and when you scroll over them pops up a small box with a product. Comic Book Resources uses those and it drives me crazy- I have to be very careful where I put my mouse.”

This is where Firefox and the NoScript plugin comes in handy. With this, you can determine what scripts, if any, get run on a per-site basis.

In addition, there is also AdblockPlus. With this handy little Firefox plugin, you can avoid even downloading extremely irritating advertisement stuff. Most of the auto-link ads come from a company called intellitxt, so adding a line that says *.intellitxt.*’ to the blocked server list completely removes them.

Combine the previous two with FlashBlock, a utility that blocks irritating flash movies UNLESS YOU CLICK ON THEM (also called click-to-flash) and you have a complete web solution for removing the most annoying bits of the web.

- 29 October 2007 at 9:00 pm

The Game (author) said:

It is intellitxt, so I will have to try that!

- 30 October 2007 at 12:24 am

Inq. of the Week: Games You Play : Critical Hits said:

[...] weeks ago Dave asked about your views on Web-vertising and it looks like a large majority just tune out Google ads all together, a whopping 48% of you! [...]

- 12 November 2007 at 8:16 am