New ad type on Total Motorcycle and in the forums +less ads!

[totalmotorcycle]

For those interested or courious...

As the credit crunch is hitting my advertisers I had to modify who was sending us ads a little and juggle things to keep a light revenue stream going. I don't expect you to know this but online advertising (everyone, not just me) has dropped by 50% over the last 6 months. With companies worried about their balance sheets and their worker jobs they don't spend on advertising like they used to.

Luckily, I've never meant for Total Motorcycle to generate cash as it's #1 reason to exist, so I'm not as hurt as a lot of other website out there.

But, I'm still down 50% over last year. Not that we are showing any less ads or getting less people, we are in fact, showing more ads because we are getting more people. Advertisers just have smaller budgets to get their job done.

What I've done is set up a type of non-intrusive text ad links. I've tested these early in the hours of the morning (3-5am your time!) so as not to disrupt anyone. These links are different than the ones you might remember years ago, they DO NOT interfere with your typing, the page or your text at all. I've even choose them to be in medium grey (rather than green/orange/blue) to make them blend in even more so they are as unintrusive as possible.

I'm also going to modify the top of the page to accept multisized banners so I can remove 2 ad banners at the bottom of every page. This won't generate any extra revenue (it will most likely lose me money!) but it will allow the forum to look "cleaner" and with the text ads I should recoup some (hopefully 15%) of the total loss.

I know no one likes ads and with me trying to limit the ads I hope that works out ok for visitors/members.

I'm sure you have noticed less popups for the past year. I've killed 96% of them now and even I don't get 1 popup most days. Although some are still getting 1 or 2, which I'll look into scrapping more if this IntelliTXT ads work out.

Mike

[totalmotorcycle]

Update:

The IntelliTXT ads seem to be working out well thus far, they are not interfearing with typing, text or user enjoyment. They are also off-setting the drop in revenue as well, which is great as we are going to need to upgrade the amount of monthly bandwidth next month to handle the increased traffic. We are currently at 1,000GB/Month and need 30% more a month for the summer. Which unfortunately, costs even more, but I'm happy to keep the site going to support motorcyclists and motorcycling for a long time.

Enjoy the site and thanks for your understanding with the new ad.

You will notice I've removed 2 ads from the bottom of the page, 1st a leaderboard and the 2nd a banner.

Mike

[totalmotorcycle]

Update #2:

I've not taken down one of the popup codes to cut the popups at least in 1/2 if not all. I'll see what happens with the loss in revenue doing this but if it means more enjoyment and usefulness of the forum for all, then it's worth it.

Mike