Eamar said:
I love the content creators on the Escapist and do what I can to support them, but ye gods the site needs to do a better job of screening its advertising partners.
I also really wish we could change the rules about discussing adblockers. We're not going to have many constructive discussions about this very current, relevant issue if we have to rely on Jim asking for an armistice to avoid getting warned.
People seem to have an issue with discussing something versus
advocating something.
The rule WAS don't encourage or enable other people to block our ads.
It said nothing about discussing ad-blocking as a concept. Just don't say THIS IS AWESOME AND I DO IT AND SO SHOULD YOU and all should be fine.
Of course, many people/children like to do the "so have you heard of Adblock *nudge* *wink*" which they like to insist is discussion rather then encouragement.
So in order to save our very overworked moderators from having to deal with constant sophistry on what does or does not constitute discussion, we've added the line that says don't talk about it at all. Very little of use was lost (people on a non-advertising forum that isn't read by anyone who makes such decisions can no longer talk about a topic that only causes more work for moderators), but threads like this can open the discussion in a more controlled manner.
In response to the multiple people asking if Pubclub is a good alternative, of course it is. That's the primary reason Pubclub exists. For perspective however, while it might generate enough money to pay for a lot of the back-end (recurring hosting/network/power costs), we need significantly more to pay the people handling tech/in-house editorial/art/marketing/project management/contributors.
In response to the people only blocking part of the site. While your favorite content producer often gets paid based on views to their content, the MONEY that pays them comes from everything, not just their content's personal ads.
VIEWING content is what determines how long it lives - content that gets more views will stay on the site longer then content that doesn't. This is due to the ad model as well of course, as high page views support the ads that pay for everything - if we were able to go full subscription then we could support more niche projects.
Speaking of niche!
READING
PEOPLE HATE READING [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJtEbvSOd_E].
When the site started, we were exclusively multi-page articles. We paid for stock photos for our artists to use as a base to make custom layouts for every article [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/content/download.php?id=7747], and did it every week for months.
We had great writing in a style rarely seen elsewhere, beautiful layouts, and my stats showed major game studios as our primary traffic (top client IPs were Bioware/Ubisoft/Microsoft/EA/etc).
However, if every active game developer read us... that's still maybe 10k uniques at best. Lots of fantastic and influential people, but none of them are helping pay for the hosting and our 25cent-a-word articles. If we went subscription only, we'd have even fewer readers (both due to effort and most people not actually justifying paying for game articles) that would taper off even more with time.
In regards to the "people hate reading" comment, we had stats for our early articles that would show views per page.
WITHOUT FAIL, we saw the same pattern [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers] in viewers, regardless of the quality/relevance of the content they were reading.
If 10000 people read the first page, 8000 would read the second, 6000 would read the third, 4000 would read the fourth page, etc. You might expect people to generally finish an article they were over halfway through, or otherwise show behavior based on the tedium of the content, but no.
The only constant factor was effort to click through to the next page.
Every single article had an inverse slope of readers per page over time. How can we have a business model based on reading when nobody can even finish an article because "ugh so many words"
We saw this again with many contests (on WarCry back when it was an active site) that gave away free things where we'd have more prizes left over then contest entries (these days we're big enough due to non readers and more aggressive promotion where that rarely happens). Effort.
So, then we got videos to bring in the page views so we could keep making a website. Which brought in orders of magnitude more people because it's so much easier to sit there and absorb something amusing. We still try and run articles every chance we get, but it's more whenever the higher page view things bleed enough cash where we can pay a writer to make something that won't pay for itself.
This fact depresses me daily. I love our video content, but the fact that we can't support writing because nobody will pay for it...
Due to the above, I personally find it insulting when other sites (occasionally with people who have worked with us and know these facts) decide they can do high-effort pretty long form content for free or ad-supported "the right way." When the many brilliant people I've worked with here sacrificed so much to try and make that model work.
I do admit to personally being smugly satisfied when such projects run out of money and fail (though feel bad for those without prior experience who tried to make it work), primarily because if they succeed it means that all the brilliant people I've worked with just "did it wrong" after years of effort. But it is nice to have some finely produced content to enjoy while some other internet patron's money is still flowing.
Speaking of Patrons, we ran on Venture Capitol for many years. There was at least one point where they forgave our debt and gave us more money to keep doing our thing. There were several points where we had to lay off some great coworkers/friends because of funding being cut and no money coming in. There were several points where our fantastic leader (the guy speaking in the above TED talk video) managed to bring these people back under other job titles to keep them employed. Eventually we managed to get bought by a real media company with successful sites before our investors finally cut the cord (we never made them money of course). While we are still dealing with integrating with a larger entity, it's fantastic to have more connections into both places people can see our content and people who will pay for ads on it.
Oh yeah, I didn't mention how hard it is to actually GET ads on a site. Most ad companies interested in our content will only buy for US audiences (larger paying gamer audience/just don't care about "foreign" markets due to various good and bad reasons). Out of the ones that do, they typically will only spend their limited advertising budgets in very specific places. Requirements like "top 3 trafficked video game related website".
You know what ads the #4 most popular website gets? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H68eCEWKb7M&t=158]
So we had many months where even with "decent" traffic, we couldn't even fill the ad space. Which means no money other then what "filler" ads bring in, or "house" ads that just point to our own site.
AS FAR AS OBNOXIOUS ADS are concerned, they come from two directions.
One is from an advertiser saying "hey we know this is obnoxious, but we'll pay you SEVERAL TIMES MORE per view for this because it is so obnoxious.
The other is from "filler ads" that bring in a whole network. When we can't run targeted ads (due to nobody wanting to buy that space or not being selected for the ad lottery that month and getting no real ads) we run filler ads, which are a network that we tell "give us X categories of ads". These networks allow us to retro-actively block certain ads, but we mostly rely on them to block "bad" ads from getting through.
(As a quick aside - first time we tried to use Google Adwords as filler years ago, they kept pushing MMO gold seller ads that we expressly forbade. Our only option was a LITERAL (no wildcards) HAND MAINTAINED BLACKLIST OF SPAMMER DOMAINS that had something like a 200 domain LIMIT. EVERY GOLD SELLER URL was a unique throwaway domain, and later they started using web searches for their URL. We couldn't even ban all the domains we knew about due to hitting the size limit on Google's blacklist.)
These days as we're slightly bigger and can give the companies running these filler ads a harder time, they've been pretty good overall about keeping crap out. However, each region has their own ads and stuff slips through.
I'd really love to self host ads and get rid of the annoying Javascript includes (WHICH ARE SO EASY TO BLOCK, my personal favorite is blocking the "blockmetrics" include) - but A SELF HOSTED AD ISN'T TRACKED BY THIRD PARTIES. Which means ad companies will very rarely pay for it because they can't "trust" the numbers. Which means that they use braindead Javascript that's easily filtered. Also notice that sites you see who host/design their own ads typically have higher quality ads and relatively little user complaints - often the users enjoy the community targeted humor/etc that these kinds of banners tend to employ.
PLEASE LET US KNOW [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/chat/Tech-Team] if an ad is playing noise (without you starting it) or won't close/is otherwise obnoxious. Unfortunately the other annoying types of ads (rollovers that do close, flashing idiocy) probably can't be removed because they pay for the privilege. But if it's bad please complain and we will pass it along to our ad people. Most people don't say anything (again, effort or indignation at having seen the ad in the first place generally leads to blocking everything)
Often due to region targeting or not watching a particular piece of content with multiple people to see everything, we don't see the ads at all / in the proper context / only non-technical people see them and don't realize something is wrong.
Pretty much all of us here despise the entire website advertising ecosystem outside of self hosted custom designed things (i.e. effort was taken to make it look good for the target audience - which also costs more money/time). BUT! They are the only way to PAY for a website to run.
Alternate revenue streams are upfront donations by the
majority of a site's traffic in a way that doesn't significantly reduce the traffic we'd get from not charging. This is almost impossible to sustain, and even if you do start with a solid audience, the audience will taper off over time for more important expenses unless you regularly give them something completely unique (that likely costs even more money then your average "quality" content due to being a unique expense)
One last note on ad trackers that you see so many of everywhere. These are the trackers ad companies used of "impartial traffic monitoring" - when we tell them we have X traffic, these trackers back up our numbers (or for things like Google Analytics, are often a "modern" website's only form of personal traffic analysis - which also saddens me greatly for various reasons). Or in the case of shit like Comscore, companies pay an unreasonable sum (several thousand) to be added to Comscore's database which is an aggregator for many large advertising companies to pick the top 3 sites in their niche and only advertise with them (I think/hope we're done with them). Anyway, the other trackers are generally how ad companies actually track impressions, so blocking them is sometimes worse then blocking the ads for a website.
I personally block third party Google as often as possible, because while I like their utility, they're too omnipresent now; and I enjoy putting holes in the log files of people who would rather use third party Javascript to give them to Google then keep real logs.
SHORTER VERSION:
Talking about Adblock is banned because too many people like playing with the moderators and the definition of "advocating" something.
We hate browsing with ads, but don't know of other reasonable ways to pay for the people and hosting of the site.
Pubclub helps, but can't pay for enough to run the site by itself unless MANY more people use it. We're always trying to think of ways to make it more attractive, but it's hard to come up with things that we wouldn't enable for everyone.
People as a whole really really hate effort, which is why the only way you can make money on the Internet is from people paying you to show lazy people shiny things repeatedly until they lazily/accidentally click through and give the product flashing in front of them their low effort business.
On a related note, here is a funny picture:
(a bit garbled, but hope it's informative for someone and doesn't get us blacklisted from the internet advertising cabal)
