[Necro] Pop-unders on Wowhead

Beitrag von Skyfire

I guess Wowhead gets a 50 Dee kay pee minus for pulling the popups?

Beitrag von Arideni

I would gladly donate on an optional basis. I think a series of options for those willing to donate would be nice. Of course, the entire thing being optional would be better than a required fee. One can often get more from asking polite than from taking.

For example, one-a-month or ten-a-year would be totally feasible. I'm sure most rational parents would put up an annual donation if their child took over dishwashing for the remainder of the year, etc.

I'm also a stingy person, and I don't even like paying Blizzard since I only played about 10 hours in two months, but I would most definitely put in a donation for the absolute best community online.

Beitrag von 128491

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Beitrag von Primax

I understand why you're doing this, but tbh I think your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. Pop-unders are a particularly scummy business tool, on par with spam in my opinion. They're annoying and drive customers away.

I intentionally haven't blocked ads on Wowhead up until now as I like to support the site. Now though I intend to block all ads in protest.

You are member driven. Your members submit data via the wowhead looter. Your members submit comments and forum posts, driving the community. We are happy for you to make money off us -if- it doesn't negatively impact our experience.

Beitrag von 347090

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Beitrag von 347090

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Beitrag von Primax

I really don't believe they're in that bad a financial position.

If sites like imageshack.us and other hosting sites can stay up with one ad a page, why does Wowhead need 3-4 a page and popunders?

Beitrag von Malgayne

I really don't believe they're in that bad a financial position.

If sites like imageshack.us and other hosting sites can stay up with one ad a page, why does Wowhead need 3-4 a page and popunders?

Just for the sake of argument, Imageshack gets about five times as much traffic as we do—and they have 2 ads on a page, pop-unders, and a subscription program that costs $8 a month.

Beitrag von 77263

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Beitrag von Septimus

Just coming to the site and reading the first page I had the gambling ad show its head three times, in a matter of minutes. so if its restricted to 24 hour time limit or even a once per visit pop-up it is faulty.

Edit: Browsing the site for a bit longer, it seems I have a 40/60 percent chance of getting it every time I click a Wowhead link.

Beitrag von Neanoa

You start off by saying how much you, yourself, hate pop-ups - yet you sellout to these pathetic methods of making money?

I'm using firefox, and I get these popups a lot when I use this site that I normally enjoy, but these popups are making me more and more go to other places for the infomation I seek.

The worst part about your popups is that I aren't even being directed to the actual link I clicked - it only brings up that god damn popup and I then have to close that @#$% and then go back and click the link again.

If you had any principals you wouldn't use excuses for these lowlife methods of profitmaking - while claiming your hatred for them aswell. Don't be a sell-out.

Beitrag von 34358

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Beitrag von 46237

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Beitrag von Malgayne

I am noticing a very very large number of adverts for BTBroadband. Guess who my ISP is? :o
Perhaps dropping BT as an advertising partner might be a good start!

Sorry, just so I understand—why drop BTB as an advertiser?

Beitrag von AdsRBad

Step 1: Build a successful site based on the free work of a community
Step 2: Get greedy
Step 3: Plot how to milk more out of the community that built you
Step 4: Place the most annoying ads possible on your website
Step 5: Offer a way to not see said ads for $$
Step 6: Collect $$ from community
Step 7: Laugh all the way to the bank

Sounds like a great plan to me. Get bent, Wowhead

Beitrag von Malgayne

This thread is rapidly devolving from people offering their ideas and suggestions to people telling us we suck because we run advertisements. There are a lot of websites out there that function entirely on user contributions and still require advertisements in order to function. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, etc. etc. Those sites are supported by ads, and have no purpose except to display content that the users submit. Myspace is covered with ads everywhere you look in an attempt to make money off of it. Facebook tried to do it without covering the whole site with ads, and they're burning up investment money every day trying to find SOME way of making the site profitable. YouTube is a loss leader, supported by Google's MAIN business—which is (you guessed it) advertising.

We run a ton of different web servers. We server nearly 350 million pageviews every month—which makes us one of the top 500 websites in the world. I am damn proud of that, and we are so lucky to have such a huge fanbase. But without advertisements that traffic doesn't do anything except cost money to support. We run advertisements so that we can continue to work on the site full time, and we can keep making new features. If we didn't run advertisements, we'd have to find some other way of paying for the site, and part of the reason why I started this thread was to get suggestions and ideas on what those ways might be. The donation/subscription system wasn't MY suggestion, it came from you guys.

If you're interested in helping us solve this problem, then I'd love to hear from you. I'm trying to be open about this stuff, because I feel like you should be involved in the process. But if you're just here to call us a sellout, well...at the very least make another thread for it.

Beitrag von AdsRBad

Glad you skimmed my post. Too bad you did not read it. Advertisements were here before, and there was no uproar. The point of what I posted was this:

It is a slimy move to use reprehensible tactics to get people excited to subscribe to your service. The only reason most people will subscribe is to get rid of the pop-unders and other dirty tricks foisted upon them. You have not added anything of value, you have only taken a successful, popular site and made it borderline unusable in order to hawk subscriptions to put it back in the state people are used to.

For shame.

Beitrag von Malgayne

Glad you skimmed my post. Too bad you did not read it. Advertisements were here before, and there was no uproar.

You didn't read my post either. Let me highlight the relevant sentence:

Myspace is covered with ads everywhere you look in an attempt to make money off of it. Facebook tried to do it without covering the whole site with ads, and they're burning up investment money every day trying to find SOME way of making the site profitable.

To summarize:

Myspace is covered with really annoying ads, so a lot of people are switching away to Facebook.
Facebook has only a few ads and they are carefully selected to be relevant to the people who see them.

I don't know about Myspace. But Facebook is losing money. Every day that website stays up, they have less money than they did the day before. The only way they're staying in business is because there are investors who are giving them money to burn in the hopes that eventually someone at Facebook will figure out how to make money off of the site—probably by offering a subscription program. As a company, Wowhead doesn't have this luxury. We are expected to support ourselves, and to continue our own growth and development, entirely with the income we generate from ad revenue.

It is a slimy move to use reprehensible tactics to get people excited to subscribe to your service. The only reason most people will subscribe is to get rid of the pop-unders and other dirty tricks foisted upon them. You have not added anything of value, you have only taken a successful, popular site and made it borderline unusable in order to hawk subscriptions to put it back in the state people are used to.

If this were our goal, don't you think we'd at least wait to put the ads up until the subscription service was ready?

Those pop-unders are literally the only way we've been able to find to monetize the traffic we get from countries outside the US. I started this thread expressly for the purpose of opening the forums up to you—to explain the problems we were having and find out if you had any other ideas and suggestions which might help us to stay up—since as it is (if I'm not mistaken), international traffic costs us a portion of the money we make from US traffic, a portion that we would otherwise be able to use to continue to pay development and server costs. Thanks to the pop-unders, that is no longer true. But I understand that people don't like pop-unders—I don't either—so we're trying to give them the option to remove ALL of the ads, and get a few nifty extras in the process.

If we were just trying to rake in the cash, we'd run pop-unders on the US side of the site. But why stop there, right? As a matter of fact, why should we bother limiting the pop-unders to once a day? We get paid each time they show up. While we're at it, we can put up some gold ads too, since they pay roughly three times as much for WoW related traffic as anyone else in the world.

If you really think we're being sleazy here and trying to manipulate people into giving us their hard-earned money, I'm not sure there's anything I can say to convince you. But Skosiris, Miyari and I all work here 60+ hours a week, and we're not the only ones. We'd like to be able to continue working here 60+ hours a week, rather than working at Wal-Mart 40 hours a week and giving Wowhead whatever's left, you know?

Beitrag von Merowlin

The first mistakes wowhead ever did was to sell out to IGE, a scam company that literally takes advantage of gamers. ZAM is still IGE, which is still Yantis ideology, which will forever remain online exploitation.

I can understand if ZAM network wish not to lose money on wowhead, that is perfectly fine. However, trying to use an outdated system such as popups and pop-unders is only going to enrage the already familiar internet user.

As mentioned, being one of the leading websites online means there's going to be a lot of revenue from normal ads, using additional exploitation for the "extra percent" just doesn't flow well with a well established community.

Wowhead would not exist without it's community, treating your contributors like idiots is a bad move.

Suggestion: move the servers outside of the united states, with the right deal you could save a lot of money (not that I'm familiar with your numbers, wowhead is, after all, designed to use as little bandwidth as possible - it's a convenience both for the users and the owners).

Beitrag von 8694

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

[Necro] Pop-unders on Wowhead

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