Well, I have to make money somehow - ECF costs a lot to run. Any suggestions?
I appreciate that ECF costs money, and needs an income to stay on-line, but there has got to be a better way to run ads that what we saw here last night. I don't know if any of them were NOT about some kind of cancer, but given the reasons many of us started
vaping, these were not a good fit for this forum. I kept waiting to see something from the health groups we have been fighting against. As I said in the feedback thread about ads, I don't object to some advertising, just keep it targeted to the group and filter out the ones that are more likely to offend rather than generate a positive response to the advertiser. I would also request that you avoid the blinking banners, those flashing ads can trigger unwanted brain activity in sensitive people.
If you want ideas/suggestions, I can give you some other forums I participate in to show how you can have some advertising that doesn't drive folks away. I'm just a user, so I don't know how they get these things, but maybe you will.
forum.purseblog.com Yep, I belong to a purse forum, I'm a girl, I like bags and shoes. On the side panel, they have links to stores where you can buy products discussed on the site. This is static, and my ad blocker doesn't kill it. I actually use these links if I want to shop for something because they are handy and get me right to where I want to go. I'm sure the forum gets paid when I click their links.
There are some banners that tend to skew towards the target reader of the forum and show ads that we might like. My adblocker kills it on the PC, but on my Kindle, it still comes through.
There are also affiliate links to places like Amazon so that if I put in a link to an amazon page, it changes the text and calls it an Amazon link. There are also links so that if someone mentions a store, some of the names turn into links to that store. I see a lot of Amazon linking in ECF, so maybe that would be something you could explore to see what works for you.
www.Ravelry.com is perhaps the best site ever. I don't know if you can look at it without joining, but they have ads that are knitting/fiber arts specific. They also use the Amazon links and also have a program to get a bit of money if the users go through Ravelry to get to Amazon and check out. I turned off my ad blocker on Ravelry because they have ads that I do want to see.
And finally, about that adblocker, I started using it when one of those ad servers sent out some malicious code and infected all of the members of the site. The site owner told us about the problem and recommended the adblocker to prevent future issues. If you are going to use some kind of ad server, I really hope you have a way to monitor the content it serves your readers and kill any bad stuff that starts coming through.
