Here's the deal. Web advertising is changing, but nobody knows where it is going. AZB is experimenting with different ad formats. The banner ads you see every day were complained about loudly when they first came out, now are accepted.
We NEED to find advertising methods that work for our advertisers or we go away. It's that simple. So we experiment. Now, we certainly don't want to piss off the readers. So, give us your ideas. What forms of ads will both be effective (meaning you see and read them) and yet are not intrusive?
The new ad you see now is set to come up only once per sign-in and only when you transfer from the main page to the forum page. It only stays up a few seconds, long enough for the menu to load in the background behind the ad. So it costs you no time, it only has you see it instead of the menu loading. And you only see it once per sign-in. That seems pretty unobtrusive to me, but we want to hear more from you.
We are an advertising vehicle. Fact of life. So how do we advertise to you in ways that will make you support our advertisers the way the sponsors of other sports are supported by the fans?
The ad you are now seeing for 3 seconds is the same full-page ad that you see in Billiards Digest or any of the other magazines. I am curious why many of you find it offensive here but do not fly into a rage when you find it in your magazine. After all, you are paying for the magazine, AZB is free, and yet you accept the support of the ad in the magazine but not here. Help us out here, guys. Do you want to pay us magazine subscription rates and have less advertising or keep the site free and see ads?
It's annoying and ineffective if it's something that is only there for a few seconds and then gone.
I would advise you to go to this board and see how they do it.
www.sawmillcreek.org
They put ads in EVERY thread. If you are donating member then you don't see the ads.
They also do manufacturer giveaways and drawings each month.
Popups for me are horrible ways to advertise because they are almost always surprising and intrusive. I much prefer the kind that have some interactivity and invite me to click to learn more. Surfing around the web I find myself clicking on those types of ads frequently when they are well done.
You provide a great medium to advertise here. I think that in-thread advertising is one way to go.
One thing I have proposed to Mike several times is to have a page where all the advertisers ads are present at once. Sort of a directory. Sometimes I see a banner ad that I like and I miss it before clicking to another thread and I won't go through the motions of refreshing the page until it comes up again. I'd much rather be able to click on a link to the advertiser's page and go see it for myself there.
The thing that bugs about your comments Jerry is where you state that you want the visitors here to "support" the advertisers more. It doesn't work that way. The way it works is that you bring the eyeballs by having a reason for people to come here and the advertisers have to come with ads that are compelling enough to get people to go visit them. There is almost never a direct correlation with branding type ads such as what's here and sales. Only when you have direct response ads with specific markers to measure the response can you see what effect the ads are having.
You know the old joke, "half my ad dollars are wasted, but I don't know which half".
This isn't a charity and people are not going to click on the ads if they aren't compelling enough. They aren't going to buy products as a charitable donation unless it's for an actual charitable cause.
Give every advertiser their own forum section and make them a moderator of that section. Let them be a part of the community instead of aloof from it. Some people in the business don't come here because they don't want to be attacked. So let them stay in their own section and answer questions and put up whatever information they want the AZ community to know. If some knucklehead gets out of line then they can moderate it in that section. Make it a point to put up a bit of a protective shield for these industry people and encourage them to be here among their customer base.
Set up a ratings system for posts if possible and let people vote on them. At the end of each month or week the posters with the most liked content that's pool related get points to spend with your advertisers. Have the advertisers all donate something to the "good post" store and then the people with points can shop there.
At the end of the day there are plenty of ways to have advertising on AZ Billiards that don't annoy people and is effective. But it requires a little effort to implement and administer.
