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[Necro] Pop-unders on Wowhead
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Messaggio di
Malgayne
So as many of you have now noticed, there is now a pop-under campaign running on Wowhead.com for some demographics.
I know this is annoying. I feel the same way about pop-unders that you guys do. The reason why it's taken so long to get an admin response to these threads is because I've been trying to find some other way of covering our costs. But economic times are very difficult, and we're trying to find ways of making ends meet. Maintaining a database site (particularly one that goes through the kind of bandwidth Wowhead generates) is an expensive proposition, and in this economic climate it's difficult to find people who are willing to spend big money on advertising with us—especially since we've tried to do our part to make the ads on Wowhead relatively unobtrusive, which makes them less attractive to potential advertisers.
All of this is being reinvested into the site. It goes towards keeping us working full-time, rather than having to take day jobs. It goes towards bringing new people onto the ZAM team so we can keep building out new features.
Right now the pop-under ads are set up to only appear once every 24 hours, and they are only running internationally (outside the US). If anyone catches the ad campaign disobeying those rules, please email me at feedback@wowhead.com so it can be dealt with.
It is my sincere hope that we don't have to rely on this method for very long. Very shortly we have planned to release a small donation/subscription system, which will remove all the ads for users who are signed up (as well as including a few bonus perks).
In the meantime, please direct all of your opinions into this one thread. Your feedback is
always
welcome, positive or otherwise. Please keep it clean, obviously, but straightforward, honest feedback will never be deleted or discouraged. I am especially interested in hearing the opinions of people who have suggestions on other ways we can cover our costs
without
inflicting pop-unders on you, particularly for our international users.
Messaggio di
Queggy
It is my sincere hope that we don't have to rely on this method for very long. Very shortly we have planned to release a small donation/subscription system, which will remove all the ads for users who are signed up (as well as including a few bonus perks).
:'(
I have to say Mal, I don't like this. One of the great things about this site is that you don't have to pay for it. Sure you won't have to pay for it later, but then there will be other people doing it with "special privaleges". I realize it must be hard to run this site, and that you guys have to get money somehow, but still. . . it reminds me too much of stuff like Runescape.
Messaggio di
98899
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Messaggio di
156400
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Messaggio di
blademeld
You say once every day, but I'm getting it 2-3 times a day.
Damn the IP changes at school!
Messaggio di
Smaragd
I'm reading this as a sign that ads don't work too well. Sorry if I'm mistaken about this.
The reason ads might not be working too well is probably because they make no damn sense. The ads I get here are for gambling, IQ tests, children's shows swag, VISA gold cards, and so on... I mean, who the hell clicks those things? And the worst part is that they're the standard ads that you see on hundreds of commercial sites, so most are used to ignoring them.
If there were some more sense in the ads, like other MMOs, TCGs, WoW swag, fantasy books, etc. there might be some more to earn from it. Instead, I'll put up with Paris Hilton's 120 IQ which I quite frankly don't care if I beat or not, because it's a damned lie to get my inbox spammed.
Sorry for the negative attitude.
Messaggio di
Queggy
I'm reading this as a sign that ads don't work too well. Sorry if I'm mistaken about this.
The reason ads might not be working too well is probably because they make no damn sense.
The ads I get here are for gambling, IQ tests, children's shows swag, VISA gold cards, and so on
... I mean, who the hell clicks those things? And the worst part is that they're the standard ads that you see on hundreds of commercial sites, so most are used to ignoring them.
If there were some more sense in the ads, like other MMOs, TCGs, WoW swag, fantasy books, etc. there might be some more to earn from it.
Instead, I'll put up with Paris Hilton's 120 IQ which I quite frankly don't care if I beat or not, because it's a damned lie to get my inbox spammed.
Sorry for the negative attitude.
QFT.
Messaggio di
Wildhorn
Here are some ideas
1) Add a small add under people avatar, under the text:
Malgayne
<Voice of the Wowhead>
Joined on 06/22/2007
Posts: 1851
Role: Administrator
___________________________
|.............................................|
|.............Insert Ad Here...........|
|.............................................|
----------------------------------------------
2) Add ad on the front page... but not one that take the whole space and that you click on it if you click in the "empty" part of the screen like you did in the past.
A simple ad between
Also offered in: DeutschEspañolFrançaisРусском
and
About us & contact|Terms of use|Privacy|Advertise
© 2009 Wowhead
would do it.
3) For items/spells, between the tooltip text and the Quick Fact box, you have space for an ad there. (of course it doesnt work for quests and some other stuff). That space is more or less in middle of the screen which imo is alot valuable for advertisers
Messaggio di
blademeld
Ads are personal preference imo, Wowhead can't decide which user should see which ad.
For example:
http://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/
is an ad that I liked.
http://www.perfectworld.com/ad
is not.
Messaggio di
Malgayne
The reason ads might not be working too well is probably because they make no damn sense. The ads I get here are for gambling, IQ tests, children's shows swag, VISA gold cards, and so on... I mean, who the hell clicks those things?
This is very true, and the subject of much debate and discussion here at Wowhead. I will craft a full response to this when I'm not posting from my phone, but I want you to know I am with you 100%.
Messaggio di
ggplz
The problem with the subscription idea is that no doubt you'll introduce extra ads for people who arent subscribers. This is a kind of slippery slope.
The other problem with the ads atm is that they're not exactly 12+ which is the content of the game this site is helping people to do.
Other than that, i'm just annoyed to get popups. Tell me how to block them and i will do it and you can keep living off people who dont care or are used to this.
Messaggio di
141364
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Messaggio di
78025
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Messaggio di
5200
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Messaggio di
Smaragd
To comment on FaaR's response and on donations/subscriptions: I don't see anything wrong with disabling ads for people who donate X amount of money. The ads are here currently as a source of income for the maintenance costs, while donors help pay these costs by other means. It would also increment donations by giving donors 'something' for it, without being unfair to people who won't or can't donate.
However, if by "bonus perks" he FaaR means stuff like incresed support, boost to comment ratings when creating new ones or voting, more tools/options on the forum, etc. I agree with FaaR.
Messaggio di
5200
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Messaggio di
17744
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Messaggio di
78025
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Messaggio di
Malgayne
For brevity, I'm going to try and answer as many concerns as possible in a single post.
Have you guys considered the google ads programme?...Only thing that I wonder are the kind of adds it would come up with, reading pages like
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32837
=P
It might work better opening pages on the comments section then.
We have. Unfortunately Google ads is so choked with gold sellers that most fansites which DO use them have either given up trying to block them, or spend hours every day doing nothing but pulling gold selling ads off of their Google Ad blocks. There are blacklists out there that you can download, which are lists of people to block which remove the most common offenders, but as you guys know gold selling sites are constantly changing their names or buying advertising through shell companies in an attempt to get their ads through. Thottbot ran Google ads for about a month, over 2 years ago, and I still hear people complaining about how Thottbot is "covered with gold ads".
As an aside to this, Google ads (like Google itself) cannot index text that is embedded in javascript. To see how MUCH of the site that is, try disabling javascript and browsing Wowhead for a while. This is the same reason why our temporary forum search function (which uses Google) can only search within topic titles—because that's the only part of the page that Google searches can even read. The result is that you'd continue to be bombarded with irrelevant ads—
Guanti di Cuoio Conciato
for example would just give you the websites of leather goods manufacturers.
I still occasionally get emails from misguided Google searchers who think we are a retail store, selling
Minerale di Ferro
and
Tubo di Bronzo
s. I usually ask them if they're interested in our supplies of
Meccanismo di Torio
s.
This flows directly into:
If there were some more sense in the ads, like other MMOs, TCGs, WoW swag, fantasy books, etc. there might be some more to earn from it.
The reason we have so much trouble with this is because of economies of scale. As I explained many months ago in
this thread
, we use ad networks for our advertising. Large ad networks, like the ones we use, target their ads to different sites based on simple keywords, like "online games", or demographics like "18-34 year olds". This is why despite the higher than average number of male users we have, you still sometimes see ads for things like Clinique makeup—the advertiser has targeted to the right age group but didn't specify a gender. Because we run so MANY ads we can't go through these personally—that's why we ask our users to help us by reporting ads when they misbehave.
The trouble is that things like WoW guides, TCGs, fantasy books, etc. appeal to a much more "niche" audience than things like home loans, or Visa gift cards (which presumably lots of people can use, whether they're WoW nerds like we are or not). Combine that with the fact that, say, Wizards of the Coast or Games Workshop don't have anything even CLOSE to the advertising budget that companies like Visa have, and you find a company that has to focus their advertising very carefully.
This gives them two options:
Buy Google ads. This is the most common option, because it's easy and cheap. Unfortunately, we have a lot of trouble running Google ads, so that doesn't really help US much.
Buy advertising from us directly.
This second is the choice we prefer. We've run advertising deals with Upper Deck before that we've been very pleased with. But Upper Deck is the exception rather than the rule. We have an actual sales staff who spends their time trying to sell these ad campaigns, but because it requires the time investment of not only the salesperson who has the account but also the person who runs our ad server, we have to have a minimum deal size to cover our costs. Many smaller companies (like, say, Zygor's guides) can't afford to spend this much on advertising—or if they can, they don't want to spend it all to advertise on one site. They buy Google ads instead, and you guys don't see their ads on Wowhead.
Messaggio di
Malgayne
So much for a single post. Continued:
I'm also rather appalled that you dump scummy ads that appear randomly and frequently and even play sounds and music only on us "international" visitors. I know online gambling is banned in the US, but surely you could find something else to plague and annoy american websurfers with in its stead; AOL offers or whatnot.
This isn't intentional. This again figures into economies of scale.
We have some ad sales guys on our team who are based out of the United States. The USA represents roughly 40% of our traffic. Because there are a lot of big companies who want to advertise exclusively to US customers, we can usually generate revenue off of US traffic—though far less than a company like IGN does of course—I'm sure you can see why the ads on
this page
would sell for more than the ads you're seeing here on Wowhead. Internationally, though, things become a lot more complicated. While "international" traffic makes up 60% of our overall traffic, there isn't any such thing as "international" traffic—it's Swedish traffic, German traffic, Russian traffic, Saudi Arabian traffic, etc. The second largest single source of traffic for Wowhead (if I recall correctly) is Russia, and Russia still only represents about 5% of our total pageviews. But very few advertisers want to advertise the same product in the same way in Russia, France, and Germany. As a result, we could hire an ad sales person to handle JUST Russia...but it's not economically feasible to hire a full-time person, at the same cost we pay for a full time person in the US, to sell just 5% of our traffic—when we're still defaulting our US traffic to ad networks, because there's still too much for our sales team to sell.
As a result, we wind up using ad networks almost exclusively in non-US territories. Just via the same simple ads, we make twenty times as much off of a user located in the US as we do from a user located outside the US. We work damn hard to make sure we treat you guys just as well as we treat our US users—heck, Skosiris and Mystadio aren't from the US—but the way things have been going, it costs almost as much to serve a page to an international user as we get from the ads that the page serves. So when people say "we need to find a way to monetize this traffic", it's always the international users that get the shaft.
I'm sorry about this, I don't like it. That's part of the reason why I'm talking about a subscription/donor program, because donations know no nationality.
My fears/suspicions are that long-awaited features to wowhead like gear wishlists, character profiles etc will end up being subscriber-only "perks". That would just plain suck, unfortunately.
I agree completely. This is why I used the term "bonus perks" rather than "bonus features". The directions we've been going have been things like a special title, a unique "Wowhead Patron" style badge on your user profile, allowing the user to build custom avatars (possibly including a feature which will use the modelviewer to render an avatar of your actual character), emoticons, images in forum posts (since allowing EVERYONE to embed images in forum posts would be exceedingly hard to moderate, but limiting it to subscribers should keep the workload to a manageable level), and other things along those lines. More suggestions are, of course, welcome.
The character profiler and list system will not be premium only features. You guys have waited FAR too long for that.
Definately not. 2nd one today, every 12 hours at best...
The ads cookie your browser when they appear. The cookie (as far as I know) does nothing but say "I have served an ad to this user already today". This helps both you (to keep you from getting spammed) and the advertiser (from delivering the same ad over and over to the same person, rather than reaching as many people as possible). This means, though, that any of the following things may result in the ad appearing again:
Clearing your cache.
Switching computers.
Switching browsers.
Re-setting your IP.
As far as I know there's no OTHER way of limiting the number of ads we send you, so if you wind up switching IPs a lot during the day (as
blademeld
does) you'll see the ad more than usual. I'm sorry for that.
If you DON'T meet that description and the ad is popping up more often than that (or if it's popping up above the window, it shouldn't be doing that) then let me know so I can try and get it fixed.
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