Poll: More ads on The Excpaist - Problem solved?

[Snotnarok]

It won't help, if anything the videos should be hosted through youtube and they should be partners. And they should stop hiring more people to do shows, it's ridiculous.

I worked for a company that did the exact same thing, they had us do more graphics for products and more designs, wanted us to redo the website and they hadn't paid us for 3 months. "things will get better" they told us over and over. The only way to get an inflow of cash is to change market plans and make cuts and sacrifices.

Edit: And the last I saw there were some malicious ads on the site, so adding more ads will probably only steer people away. If I got a virus off this site that damaged my artwork I'd never come back here again, that's just inexcusable.

 

[Sightless Wisdom]

Not more ads, better ads. That and all around better decision making. If you don't have enough money to pay your current content, don't hire more fucking content! However, if you need more ads because your sinking in debt, tell the community why your putting the ads up, and then do so. I'm sure we would have understood if we all got a PM saying "We're sorry, but we have no money, so here are some ads". AS opposed to the current flood of "spam protection" and advertising that they are randomly imposing on us. I mean now that I know they have a huge financial program a few ads inside of captchas don't seem nearly as offensive, but still honesty would have been nice.

 

[The Virgo]

If you look at most of the ads here, they are mostly for other features on The Escapist, like the Miracle of Sound, Jimquisition and the like. And I just watched the latest Zero Punctuation episode and there wasn't an ad while the older ones have ads. And I don't even have ad blocker!

Really, it doesn't take a genius to realize that they actually need to run ads for non-Escapist stuff! -_-' Methinks that their lack of funds is due to bad management.

This. Completely this.

So much of the ad space here is put toward things that are on the Escapist, and that most of the users already know about.

A good place to start would be using that space--ad space we're already familiar with and used to--for real ads.

Agreed!

And like I said, I have to wade through thirty second Slim Jim commercials to watch the older Zero Punctuations from way back in 2007, the ones that nobody watches that much anymore, but there was not a single ad on the new one released today, the one that a lot of collective people are going to watch and will be more willing to sit through! >:-/

I'm telling you, my guess is that bad management has something to do with this. And although they DO run ads for other things (mostly El Shaddi these days), like you said, it's mostly their stuff, which they have to give revenue to.

The space for ads that bring money in are being used on video that they have to pay the creators for. And then people wonder why they're broke! Meanwhile, those of us who know how to fix these things are sitting here unable to do anything about it. Life is crazy, I tell you.

 

[TheScottishFella]

I pay for the pub club, so I don't think I have much of an opinion on this. On the other hand the reason I payed for the pub club was to get away from the ads, but you know it ain't expensive unless you are a kid so I don't see why more don't just go for the pub club.

 

[Blaster395]

Silent banner ads are fine.

Having to wait for an ad to finish before watching something is annoying.

 

[Whateveralot]

Ad revenue goes by a simple formula:

amount of viewers * amount of ads.

What does this mean? Increasing the amount of ads might give you a boost in revenue on one side, but on the other side, less people WILL visit the website, no matter what the content, thus reducing the ad revenue (and so many other forms of revenue).

The amount of ads must be acceptible. They are now. No(t a lot of) moving ads, no pop-ups. It's good the way it is. I hate pop-up advertisement (or the ones that block your view from the website for a certain time), or the ones that play a sound when you mouse-over (or not even that, just play sound, no escaping). And I hate the ads that tell you you've won a prize with a passion, knowing that there are people that click on this, believing they've actually won something -_-.

 

[The Virgo]

If you look at most of the ads here, they are mostly for other features on The Escapist, like the Miracle of Sound, Jimquisition and the like. And I just watched the latest Zero Punctuation episode and there wasn't an ad while the older ones have ads. And I don't even have ad blocker!

Really, it doesn't take a genius to realize that they actually need to run ads for non-Escapist stuff! -_-' Methinks that their lack of funds is due to bad management.

This. Completely this.

So much of the ad space here is put toward things that are on the Escapist, and that most of the users already know about.

A good place to start would be using that space--ad space we're already familiar with and used to--for real ads.

Unfortunately the hard part is finding people to buy ads on our site. Even the ones we do manage to get often don't want to pay for non North American ad views. At all. So they get filler and house ads. We've gone months at a time with no third party ads on the site at all because nobody wanted to buy on a small site that didn't have the page views of some other larger gaming sites.

Now (like... this year) we're finally starting to fill our ad inventory because we have some ad sales people who are good at their job (or do it at all, we've had remote ad sales people who literally did nothing for months until we were able to tell it was more then business being bad and replace them) and are finally breaking into the top trafficked gaming news sites so ad buying people will look at us. But now we're suddenly rich corporate douchebag overlords and out to screw over the people who help make our site interesting.

As far as PubClub, it's great and helps us get ahead of some of our bills, and we love all of our supporters very much... but it's not a significant contributor to our ongoing bills as of yet. We would need to sell hundreds (if not a couple thousand) pubclub subscriptions a day to even come near to covering our various server/bandwidth/salary/office/contributor/etc costs. We are not selling quite that many yet, although we can always hope.

Hey, after I just posted I read what you said, so forgive me if I end up double-posting.

It's nice when somebody from the inside comes out and says what's really going down. Now if only our government would learn that.

I have never thought that you guys were evil (although I do think warnings for "low content" are, lol!) and I'm sorry to hear about those douchebag ad guys. However, like I said, today when Zero Punctuation came out there wasn't a single ad, yet there are plenty of ads on the older ones. Right there, you have a high number of people coming onto the site at one time that I'm sure a lot of people trying to get their product out would love to have their ad on. I know nothing about how advertising works, but to me that seems fairly logical.

Anyway, I wish you guys the best of luck in these hard times and I hope you pull through!

 

[BRex21]

My only problem with the adds is that they don't have variety. it may sound crazy, but watching El Shaddai over and over and over and over and over and over again is just annoying. I am however fully aware that they need the money and will keep watching the adds and willing to accept more if it keeps things free. Although i keep telling myself im going to pay there necessary pittance to join the publishers club, but I have never gotten around it.

 

[psivamp]

As long as the ads don't do any of the following, I'm okay:
play audio that isn't muted by default
rollover expansion

Actually, that's it, I guess. There was some rollover ad for Whatever: Ascension of No-one-cares (supposedly "one of the most anticipated games of this year," which I find hard to swallow with all of the huge releases and solid indie titles) that would activate as I was pulling my mouse away from the collapse button.

It should go without saying that playing audio without asking is unacceptable in all instances on any website for any reason.

 

[GoldenShadow]

If you dont like ads, buy a publisher's club membership. Its worth it.

Its not just the ads on the site, but also the ads are removed from all videos as well.

 

[Darks63]

The only way to make more ads would be to make ads pop up every time you make a post...forget I said that.

that prolly waht is next unfortunately.

OT: I voted yeah but it wont make a difference, there has to be more going on than just the EC thing that has them drained. Its possible that they just have he wrong person or persons hadling the money.

 

[razer17]

They can add some more ads, as long as they don't add anymore bloody video ads before videos. One 30 sec ad is pretty annoying for a 5 minutes video, but if they added multiple ads before I'd stop watching.

 

[Kross]

I know nothing about how advertising works, but to me that seems fairly logical.

The first time you talk to a marketing person, you will realize logic quickly goes out the window.

When there's no ads on something, it's because we couldn't get anyone to buy ads for it. Although we don't take just any ads, we've tried (for example) Google text ads on the forums in the past, but they paid so little as to not be worth the annoyance to users.

Also, many of the larger ad companies require people to be signed up with third party reporting services like Comscore. Did you know to get listed in a meaningful way in Comscore, you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year? And our only incentive for that is for the ad networks that require us to be listed in Comscore specifically before they'd even look at our site to evaluate if they wanted to buy ads. I don't think we are updated on Comscore any more, because the cost was a bit overwhelming when we had so many other things that needed the money, so we had to stop paying it.

 

[wolfcrux]

I honestly don't mind the short commercials. Just happy that 'Gaypan' popup or whatever it was called is gone.

But if you ARE going to have commercials on top of EVERY F****** VIDEO why not make it related? WHY do I have to sit and look at a commercial for fucking LADYSHAVERS?!?!

 

[lacktheknack]

And I hate the ads that tell you you've won a prize with a passion, knowing that there are people that click on this, believing they've actually won something -_-.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/new_car.png

Had to be posted.

 

[lacktheknack]

I honestly don't mind the short commercials. Just happy that 'Gaypan' popup or whatever it was called is gone.

But if you ARE going to have commercials on top of EVERY F****** VIDEO why not make it related? WHY do I have to sit and look at a commercial for fucking LADYSHAVERS?!?!

Because Venus paid for the ad space, and no one else did.

I assume it's Venus, anyways. They didn't pay for an international ad, so I, a Canadian, didn't see it.

 

[Something Amyss]

Hey guys, as most of you know, the Escapist and the Extra Credits guys are in a bit of a fight right now. You can find both sides of the story on pretty much every other thread, but it seems none of this would have been a problem in the Escapist could pay its bills. It seems that currently, this site isn't turning a profit and if they don't fix this, it's not just Extra Credits that will be out of a job.

While some of you support the site by paying for a publisher's club membership, I'm not the kind of person who will pay for that. A better solution is simple.

More ads.

Right now, I see long blue columns at the side of the screen with one ad at the top and bottom. While this looks very classy, I can image why it doesn't get the job done. Personally, I'd rather deal with more ads on the page then watch one of my favorite sites go in the crapper.

What do you think? Would you be okay with more ads? Would more ads even be a good solution? Why or why not?

Personally, I'm of the belief the Escapist doesn't want my ad money.

The base ads aren't so bad, but every time they do one of those frames around one of the videos, it causes my browser to hang. Okay, not every time, but probably 4/5 times. The volume on the vid ads always seems to be different than 90% of the content, which leads to my eardrums bleeding if I want to hear the video. The biggest exception appears to be ZP.

Maybe it'd be different if I viewed more of the site more often, but I'm pervaded by ads with really annoying behaviours. Paying for Pub Club seems like rewarding them for this sort of near-antagonistic behaviour, and I won't do that. But, of course, the alternative is to continue watching ads that do weird things to my browser or make my ears bleed or whatever.

Adding more ads might just drive me away from this site.

It's not that I'm cheap, and it's not that I don't want the Escapist to succeed, but the way they've come about this is all wrong, and I don't want to give them the impression I approve. Or that I'm rewarding them for it. And I certainly don't want more ads that might screw up my already tenuous relationship with the internet (Comcast in my area seems to go down if people even THINK about using it).