Hey All,
You've likely noticed AdSense is now appearing at the bottom of all pages. Hopefully there aren't any objections to us trying to pay the bills.
As you can probably guess it costs money each month to keep the site running and we'd like to recover the cost and even make a little something, something for the time we're putting into the place. We figured it was better to start sooner rather than later and so yes, we have ads now.
At the moment it's just the one block of AdSense at the bottom, but there will be more. I wanted to be upfront with where we're thinking of placing ads so as not to shock anyone. Tomorrow (Monday?) I'm planning on placing another ad block in the header on the right. For now it will be AdSense, but in time it will likely be banner ads.
That should be all you'll see for awhile as long as you're logged in. If not logged in there will be an ad after the first post in any thread. As long as you're logged in you shouldn't see it, though.
Down the line we'll probably be adding one more ad block as a sidebar on the right hand side of pages. That should be it. While we do want to make some money, we're not looking to make the place more ads than content. The idea is to have a few ad blocks around in areas that you can easily ignore if you prefer not to see them, but that will hopefully help us pay the bills around here.
I still have to work out some of the coding details. I don't think a ready made plugin exists for quite what we want to do and it may involve a little custom coding. If you see things showing up briefly every now and then, it's likely just me testing some code.
One thing we do want to do is offer ads for things you will actually find useful. If you have any suggestions for things you'd like to see please share them.
I'm thinking if we can build up enough here we can work out discounts for SBF.net members for products and services many of us would want. No guarantees we'll be able to do this, but we're going to try. My guess is it'll be awhile before we're a large enough community to be attractive to advertisers for the purposes of discounts, but if you have suggestions for the kinds of things you'd like to see please let us know.
Anyway I just wanted to let you know about the ads and the plans for them. Again I hope there aren't any objections to the forum making a little money to pay for what's been spent and what it will cost to keep things running.
Thanks,
Steve
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