Ads?
 

I logged in via my android and noticed an ad at the bottom? Trisphee has ads? :(
Or does my phone have some sort of ad-placement malware?

No no, no malware. They're experimenting with some unobtrusive ads at the bottom of the website to bring in some small income. Just trying to help offset hosting costs until we're fully up and running again I think.

Yeah, I added that last month, just the one at the bottom. Figured I'd see how much it makes.

The answer: almost nothing. I'll probably remove it again after a while.

I'm not bothered by AdBlock. :) The ads are pay-per-click, and I am explicitly forbidden to encourage users to click on ads. It's supposed to be entirely because the user is interested in the content. If you block ads, well, you're clearly not interested.

Pay-per-(thousand-)view ads are those noisy, in your face, auto-play type ads, and I hate hate hate those. They'll not come here. (And if they DO, AdSense is fired immediately.)

Well, I can understand where they're coming from. It's super hard to have a profitable website. And it really gets harder once you pass a certain size threshold. Gaia has passed that point, definitely.

I'd rather get the income from user engagement and getting at least some people to buy runes and the like. Of course, the percentages on that are generally super low, too. It's an interesting challenge, finding a balance between making money and not coming off as a money-grubbing scumbag.

Gaia used to be a nice site, until they became money hungry. When you can say that having 1 BILLION of a currency is still too little, I feel like that's when a site start's having issues...

.. / end rant. lol

It's hard to say exactly where they went wrong, but yeah, I'd say Gaia is not being very successful at the "making money while not looking like a money-gubber" balance.

I remember AutoCash...I actually subscribed to it for a few months, lol. $10/month or something.


A subscription thing would be nice to have, although I don't think we really have enough active users yet to warrant having such a thing available. Still...it's a possibility. :)

As it happens, I knew about that thread...because I have Google Analytics to tell me traffic trends, including where people come from. :P

I dunno about you but I never noticed the ad before, however, when i scrolled down to look at it --- it thinks i need to meet me some fine asian women.

I wonder what that says about me ._.

xD

Oh...I have adblock so I didn't even know an ad got placed down there. But if it's PPC anyway, I don't feel so bad.

Never feel bad about blocking ads. The norm is horrible, intrusive ads, and those need to go away.

Many adblockers are letting safe, unobtrusive ads through on sites that can validate that they are only using ads that meet certain criteria of being not-annoying. Could be an option if you ever do want to go the ad route.

You do know I work for AdSense, right?

EDIT: If I didn't see the code for myself I wouldn't have believed it was AdSense. o.o It's advertising womens' shoes. How do you have this thing configured, Toho? -- no, scratch that, IM me.

I, uh, personally would be rather uncomfortable if Tris developed some sort of subscription thing.

If there was a subscription (and if there ever is, it won't be for quite a while), it would just be a way to automatically get Runes, not to unlock more features or something.

Aah, okay. ...I get the feeling we've had this discussion elsewhere a long time ago. That's reasonable.

Heh, nah, we figured out what was going wrong -- AdSense was probably looking at the fact that I was researching stuff for making costumes, and thought "this person likes clothing, this website is about fashion design, here, have an ad".

Honestly, AdSense is one of the providers I'd whitelist if I did use an ad blocker, and not just because I work for them -- AdSense text ads are some of the most tasteful, least obtrusive ads I've ever seen, and they NEVER open pop-overs or pop-unders. There's a few other things I'd like to see them change, but since I work for them I'm not going to say what in public because I don't want to inadvertently leak anything that would violate my NDA.

I'm...not sure I'm allowed to say? Whatever. They don't specify. If I had to guess, I'd say it varies based on what ad it is.


I know most social ads I can buy on Twitter or Facebook, or AdWords, are paid per interaction (click), so I'd be paying for people to click to the site (or the tweet, or the facebook post), and anything beyond that is outside the scope of the ad agreement.

Well, I don't know if you can necessarily trust me at my word since I WORK for them, but yes, AdSense text/image ads are safe*. AdSense video ads are safe* but if one of your concerns is loading a bunch of videos that you're not going to watch, then it doesn't particularly matter how safe they are.

* Where by "safe" I mean that they won't do anything evil to your computer/browser/account/etc., although they're still going to track some information about your web-surfing habits. If this bothers you more than getting inane ads for things that you'd never possibly be interested in, you can turn it off in your Google account settings.

The idea behind ads is you click on them if you have interest in their content.

Clicking for the sake of clicking, well...that's what ad networks stop serving you for. ("you" in this context is "me," and "stop serving" means "stop making me money" :P)

Now, if it's interesting to you, but ultimately doesn't matter, then that was a good click.

But yes, there are no video ads that appear on Trisphee, and that will continue to be the case. I've noticed that they occasionally use flash and are animated, but that's about it.

There you go, then. An ad properly utilized. :D