Doing away with signatures on posts, and shrinking the dimensions of the profile pics on our posts would go a long way in helping the flow while scrolling.
Again, you're going the way of annoying the user base: doing away with the small things that make people 'feel at home' in order to pepper them with ads. I see your point with signatures that sport images the size of Nebraska—some of them are almost ads in themselves—, but to deny people even a couple of lines for a quotable quote alienates them.
Make sure that it actually works. You are trading off annoying your forum users for extra ad clicks. There is a point at which it is actually counterproductive, and you lose traffic and clicks.
Indeed. The real question, and one that at not time do I demand the Admin to answer for he owes me nothing, is whether mere clicks and traffic are beneficial for the sponsors. I expound below...
Agreed. The internet advertising business model is cancer. The measurements don’t capture ad effectiveness, the fact of infinite inventory makes for a race to the bottom, as we are seeing here, and it necessarily makes website features that are hostile to the user base in order to be better for advertisers.
Dead on. I once attended a business informal meeting and heard one business owner boast of how many Likes his venture was getting on Facebook. I said nothing but thought: "and how much MONEY are you actually making from those Likes?" The answer: from peanuts to
nothing.
Likes are NOT sales. And it's well known that Fakebook has Like-clicking farms.
I hope that technologists help enable different business models that allow these things to happen without relying on fickle advertisers or pushing unwanted ads in front of forum users. Unfortunately the big guys in tech are just working on more intrusive surveillance for ads instead.
This reminds me of a game I used to love playing on my iPhone: Bejewelled Blitz. Great fun, till the ads started creeping in and appearing after every single game, before the match, or when you least expected it. Sometimes they had an X to close them, sometimes they didn't. Most annoying were video ads, which also eat up bandwith, which is precious on a mobile device. I never clicked on the ads, not even on the big X (if you click on the X you're basically clicking on the ad, effectively acknoledging it): upon seeing the beginnings of an ad display I killed the app: I became quite swift at it. Still, some ads sometimes caught me unaware and one of them, which makes my point here, was a geographically targetted ad (all of them were actually—the surveillance mentioned by Casual) about a local company I had never heard about: I immediately hated that company. Had I seen their ad in a less intrusive way, I might had been interested; but having it interrupt my playing made me hate it. My point? The ad was financially profitable for PopCap, and a financial failure for the company due to the negative impression its ad caused. It was also a loss for PopCap, as I have discontinued my playing of that game: not just because of the ads-evasion calisthenics, but because of the continued updates and crApple's own annoying 'update your iOS' ads which made me pull the plug on the wi-fi permanently on that phone.
My point at large: sure, we can click on the ads and links to sponsors: that helps the site, but does it really help the sponsors? It is my understanding that sponsors only make money when the person clicking on their ad actually BUYS something. Sure, I click regularly on SPC's ads because some of the pipes catch my eye, but I never buy anything, really. How then did my ad-clicking help SPC?
Now, I'm not trying to stir up trouble or be a revolutionary here, I really am not. I have been interested in becoming a sponsor myself, but these ad mechanics (acrobatics in some cases) give me pause: I won't earn money from mere perusers, and if even businesses like SPC, P&C or Tobaccopipes.com (the last two named aren't sponsors anymore), which carry tons of stuff have trouble getting sales from ads, what chances do I have as a startup that carries only a small volume of niche items? Again and again: likes and traffic are not revenue, only the vague promise (or illusion) of potential revenue, and thus, I too conclude that the current ad models are flawed and not really helpful to the advertisers.
When I was doing photography I spent thousands of dollars on advertising and never got a single sale from it. Only the places where I advertised did.
Again and for the last time: I'm not throwing low punches at Kevin or childishly threatening him with leaving immediately if he doesn't do what I like. I like Kevin well enough and I understand and feel for his current quandary with helping his sponsors make money. I'm simply saying that the current model is not optimal, and that a better solution needs to be found for everyone: businesses and the user base that keeps them running.
