Whats with the new ad's everywhere

Look I realise you guys need to bring in a certain amount of revenue to keep this board running smoothly but it seems all these ads are getting a bit too intense, they're everywhere. If this is a mechanism to raise funding perhaps this board should look to other places for income like donations.

I think these ad's are compromising the integrity of this site making it seem less professional.

On a pure space issue, the board home is 5.3 million square pixels, and has five locations for ads:
2 728x90 "leaderboards" -- 131,040 square pixels
3 120x600 "skyscrapers" -- 216,000 square pixels
For a total of 347,040 square pixels devoted to advertising... or about 6.5% if the space devoted to ads.

Or, let's take an average thread, www.abovetopsecret.com... which comes out at about 16.7 million square pixels and the following ads:
1 728x90 "leaderboards" -- 65,520 square pixels
4 120x600 "skyscrapers" -- 288,000 square pixels
For a total of 353,520 square pixels devoted to advertising... or about 2% of the space devoted to ads.

Now, if you're not a member or logged in, the number of ads is about 50% more, and there will be about three pop-ups every hour.

Our space devoted to advertising is far less than a magazine or TV show.



Donations would never be enough to fund monthly operations.

Consider March 2006, our biggest month ever.

We served 11.9 million pages.
That's an average of 16,085 pages per hour.
Our HTML logged 158 gigabytes of bandwidth (over 1.6 terabytes of all content).
That's an average of 5 gigabytes of HTML every day.
We had over 1.5 million unique users access over 750,000 unique board pages.
More than 150,000 different URL's referred traffic to ATS and there were more than 170,000 different search terms used by people to find us.

We currently have 4 "enterprise class" servers with an additional networked back-up device and extended service plans to ensure the site remains up for our users who enjoy a diverse range of free services such as podcasting and an upload space. It's not hard to research the potential costs of our hosting environment, which is in need of additional machines and a load-balancing cluster.



I understand your concerns, but our continued growth seems to indicate that most users seem to understand the need for an average of 5% of our page-space devoted to advertising.

If I might ask, why would advertising make us seem "less professional"?

Is to use very limited advertising, as we do here, versus "donations". The vast majority of "professional" websites utilize high quality advertising to fund operations.

Credibility is at the heart of why we don't accept donations.

One need only look at the state of politics in the U.S. to understand why a "donation system" is a direct path to lost credibility, increased potential for bias and other negative influences.

The biggest and, IMHO most accurate, complaint against U.S. politicians is they have to cater to their biggest contributors. This sort of pandering is exactly what causes corruption of the system.

Were we (Owners of ATS) to follow your suggestion, we would be held hostage by those who donated the majority of the funds. To think we would ever get the operating costs covered by a "monthly subscription" is just incorrect. The statistics prove the funding amounts of "subscription sites" varies wildly from month to month. The exceptions are sites that provide a product we are not interested in at all.

As my partner points out above, our continued growth in both registered Members and visitor traffic says it all.

Springer...

Personally, I would suspect that a very large chunk of the users here either use Firefox (or some 3rd part ad-blocking software to make IE work like Firefox) and therefore never even see any advertising

Whoops, make sure the advertisers don't read this post!

Seems like once a week we have another one of these threads asking about all the ads and popups. For registered members it seems like we never have any popups come up, and we have a few banners here and there.

How can the integrity of the board possibly be lost with this?

Its these banners that keep us coming back to the board, without them we would be off somewhere else in cyber space remembering the good days on ATS.

Appreciate the free service we have here. I don't know the half of it, but I can just imagine the hard work that goes on behind the scenes for all of us to enjoy this.

I thank all those involved.

Why would you expect to enjoy extensive content and member services while blocking our only source of revenue?

I run Firefox... I dont allow popups, so I didnt even know there were popups here, lol
But the ads arent bad...

The only ads I didnt like since ive come here, are the ads by google under the main buttons on the page... The only reason I dont like them is they had some good links one time when I first came here about some sort of videos, and i clicked it thinking it was a link on the site, lol
So i dont like it because it did its job...

Aside from that, I dont see any of the advertising as a nusiance at all.
In fact I believe, I clicked on an ad here the other day, because there was a really hot girl in the ad, and it was for one of those dating sites... I had a few minutes to spare so i said 'fine, im gonna check this out... do they really have these beautiful women that they advertise?'

Well, needless to say... I sigined up and filled the little stuff out..
And uhh... Well, im 21. So, im not into the 60-ish year old women. Especially the 'thick' ones... lol
I wont click on that link again.

But you all have to understand that it does cost a very good chunk of money to run a site, especially one that has a good amount of traffic.
And advertsing is the best way to pay for that.

Oh, and Springer...
Is that 'product we are not interested in at all' what I think it is?
If so...
Speak for yourself.
:-P

The "new ads" I saw were just because I wasn't logged in, but you're right its not so bad when you are logged in. To address the concern that having donations would hold the board hostage to some donors, you could implement a system so that all donations were anonymous.

We've always said the best donation any member can make is quality posts. That's been our repeating mantra for three years, and we're not likely to change.

Somewhere around here I created a thread comparing posting on ATS to capitalism... maybe I'll try to scrounge it up.

Quality Posts, right.

Where do you want that check to be mailed to?

Or do we just put bags of money underneath the Park Benches like last time?

Either or.

There's some pretty good stuff here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

And here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

And for good measure:

The script for the government's plan to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon was writtin by the Joints Chief of Staff back in 1962:
Project Northwoods. America's plan to attack America.

A discussion/argument on the Pentagon impact being a missile of some sort or an airplane:
9/11: A Boeing 757 Struck the Pentagon

A discussion on how the Diebold voting machines have helped to lock up the Republican vote in Ohio:
The Diebold Factor

First-hand experience of FEMA "detainment camp" tactics:
I just got back from a FEMA Detainment Camp

Recorded government conversations revealing an assassination conspiracy:
11/29/63 Conversation Between Johnson & Hoover (JFK Assassination)

A new analysis of the film showing the Kennedy assassination:
An Analysis of the Zapruder Film

A difficult but engrossing analysis of details and clues found in the Nick Berg beheading video:
English Words and Western Voices Heard on Nick Berg Beheading Video

William One Sac started this thread to discuss the possibility that Nich Berg wasn't really executed by Insurgents:
Was Nicholas Berg Executed by the CIA?

Your DNA will be required to obtain a job in Australia:
Give DNA or no job; A.F.P.

The third ATS research project is going to dig deep into the shadows of the world's past and discover the truth behind the Omega Agency.
The Omega Agency Research Project

A focus on the foreign share-holder aspects of our financial building blocks and the role they play in our stability
Who Really Owns the USA?

Is it justifiable to continually punish and blame the children of today when we are a direct influence on there actions – Why does there appear to be so much focus on the children and not on the parents?
A Conspiracy Against Children: Exactly who is out of control?

Examining the issues related to a planned demolition of the World Trade Center:
Bombs in the Building: World Trade Center 'Conspiracy Theory' is a Conspiracy Fact
Physics Prof Says Explosives, Not Fires Brought Down WTC Towers

Irregularities and fraud in the 2004 U.S. election:
2004 U.S. Election Results Overview & Discussion

Gazrok's Roswell Series:
The Case for Roswell: Part I.
The Case for Roswell: Part II
The Case for Roswell: Part III (Section A)
The Case for Roswell: Part III (Section B)

One of our highest-viewed threads is scathingly critical of the U.N.
U.N. Oil For Food Scandal Grows. Possibly the Largest in Human History.

Good stuff S.O, thanks for the read.

Which gives me a suggestion idea. How about a "ATS Top 20" page, with 20 of the best voted conspiracy threads on the site are linked, in no preticular order. People could vote for the thread, and that way we get to see the best of th ebest, something to aspire for.

S.O (and/or Springer/WOS):
Are you at liberty to divulge whether or not your Google ad bar payments are given to you on a per-click basis or a per-view (no click) basis?
If it were a per-click basis, I would happily encourage other users to randomly click the google ad bars, even if not interested in the content, simply for the purpose of getting more funds for ATS (which is always a good thing).
Cheers, NrKy.