Fappy said:
Man, I wonder how Kross feels about being called out like that XD
I'm not sure if I'd be amused or upset, honestly.
I'd feel e-Famous, but I've been quoted by better writers in the past who were writing something other then a poorly informed blog/forum post.
One point I keep seeing is "Sites with gigantic communities like Reddit have tolerable ads"
People miss the point that a website can't just "choose" to have well curated ads. You have to find the people who are willing to PAY for those ads. These people DO NOT pay for ads on "small" websites.
These are often the same people who claim to "make money" on their personal website ads.
These are rarely websites with multiple full time staff and an infrastructure of more then one server (oh, and server resources don't scale linearly with traffic due to redundancy and other topology concerns - it's closer to an exponential growth in hardware to keep up with a linear growth in traffic. This is why many setups can't handle traffic spikes as gracefully as they might like)
Your choice at that point is to run more obnoxious ads that pay more, or run low impact ads that don't return enough money to be worth having on the site at all. (At one point we tried out Google ads in the forums, but they didn't pay enough to be worth the annoyance of having to see the ad)
Of course, we don't WANT annoying ads, but our choice is this:
Use the ads that pay, making our best effort to keep them tolerable (which is primarily a reactive rather then pro-active process unless you're a large enough client to lay down ultimatums with ad networks - like Reddit. Though I will say these days things seem to be significantly better in regards to "we don't want X content", obnoxious implementation is often the annoying part)
Live entirely off of Subscriptions - which at the current rate would be several thousand new subscriptions a week, every week. Contributors would have to be funded per episode with donation drives or something similar, or the rate of new subscriptions would have to be much higher/pricier then what it takes to pay full time staff and infrastructure. This also has sustainability issues with bringing in new people with content teasers, etc. Most sites that are subscription-only offer a service beyond reading/watching media, or they have an alternate revenue stream keeping things online (typically this), or they fail as soon as their funding dries up.
Milk venture capitol or personal savings to run the site as long as possible for cheap, not soliciting third party contributions. Eventually the site quietly goes offline, maybe with a donation drive or two to keep it online for a few more months if people really liked whatever we could actually afford to put on it (most of our time would be spent on our other full-time jobs as well). When it goes offline, people comment on the few things they liked, and then move on to the next site that still happens to be online, maybe with a sad comment on their social media of choice.
The only website of size I can think of that manages to live without ads is Wikipedia, and that is primarily due to comped hosting, large entities donating, and later a critical mass of community (when you're that big and
unique in your utility, the tiny percentage of people willing to donate large amounts of cash/resources can become a reasonable number)
As far as "alternatives" that some people seem to hint at, this is a problem everyone who tries to run a website full-time would love to solve. Please share your wisdom, you can help solve a major issue, and we'd love to talk about it.
[hr]
We try not to BERATE people about Adblock issues, though many seem to re-iterate that sentiment.
We do try and let you know the state of paying for the website when we have the opportunity.
It's your computer (or at least, it's not ours).
You can Adblock.
You can use Youtube.
You can use other gaming websites.
We're not going to berate people about such things, but we will ensure that our limited resources last as long as possible.
This means minimizing things that take away from the site's funding. This means stating our case as best as we're able.
Please don't waste our resources if you aren't going to help keep things online. If for whatever reason you can't support us, that's fine, but please don't make the extra effort to shove it in our faces (on that note, thanks to whoever posted that news article for keeping it on their own host along with its comment thread). Enjoy such things on your own terms and all is well.
If we can help people see our point of view to the degree where they want to chip in, fantastic. If not, we understand, but please refrain from adding to a discussion if the entirety of your comment is vitriol rather then anything we can use to improve the situation. Many people apparently didn't even realize they were Adblocking us.
Personally, I wanted to ban many of the people whining about moderation in a thread that's not about moderation for being off topic/low content (as very few of them actually contributed to any Adblock discussion other then to say they used it). But I am unfortunately not allowed to make our rules more stringent. These people who unrepentantly offer a vitriolic comment about how they will never support a website, and we should feel honored to have their server load... please, just leave. We don't want you taking up resources. You're literally doing nothing but costing us money and slowing down the site for everyone else.
Reiterating that I am not talking about people who use Adblock, I'm talking about the people who feel the need to post about it without contributing in any way to a discussion (much like any low content "me too" post).
Furthermore, [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.297629]
