Advertising

Advertisements at the bottom of each open-pandora.org page(and maybe the boards).

  • Yes, to reduce the lack of money it would be okay

    Votes: 15 39.5%
  • No

    Votes: 23 60.5%
  • Yes, but there should be more advertisement's

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    38

michie4life

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What if OPT would place advertisements at the bottom of each open-pandora.org page (and maybe the boards).
They would reduce the amount of money they still need (AFIAK).
They could stop advertising as soon as all the bills are payed. :p

This is just a idea, if I'm incorrect please correct me.

Discuss:
 
Extremely successful web comic authors make enough to live on, probably in the neighbourhood of 50000-1000000 US per year.
Assuming OPT could somehow duplicate the numbers of Penny Arcade, it would still take them years to pay off their debt (granted, it's taking years now, but still...)
They could probably do it as a supplement, but don't think of web advertising as some sort of magic bullet to make money. Most people that I know make just a few thousand per year from advertising.
The fastest way for OPT to recoup their losses is to sell more devices.
 
Michie4life said:
What if OPT would place advertisements at the bottom of each open-pandora.org page (and maybe the boards).
They would reduce the amount of money they still need (AFIAK).
They could stop advertising as soon as all the bills are payed. :p

This is just a idea, if I'm incorrect please correct me.

Discuss:
I don't mind ads as long as they're not the intrusive flash ads that fly past the usable part of the web page constantly while making loud noises. (I'm looking at you yahoo) but ads alone wouldn't be enough to pay the bills. Who knows, it may be just enough to pay for the web hosting, but is it worth it?

If you are trying to sell a product, would you put advertisements of other products up on a webpage that is basically already an advertisement for your product? Not worth it IMO. I would expect craig to be more professional than that.
 
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Gruso said:
The main problem with the idea is that they're not OPT's boards. ED hosts and administrates the forum as a free service to the entire community from Dingoo to Caanoo, so it wouldn't be right to feed revenue to one independent project.
He said open-pandora.org (and then tacked the boards on as a maybe in parenthesis) :p
 
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Michie4life said:
I'm not saying it's some magical way to make money, but it would help.
I could make the same argument for rooting through garbage for discarded beer bottles to take back for a refund (which I used to do as a kid; could easily make $50 a week, which is a fortune to a 10 year old and approximately the same amount they'd make from web advertising :p)
 
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WizardStan said:
Michie4life said:
I'm not saying it's some magical way to make money, but it would help.
I could make the same argument for rooting through garbage for discarded beer bottles to take back for a refund (which I used to do as a kid; could easily make $50 a week, which is a fortune to a 10 year old and approximately the same amount they'd make from web advertising :p )
But.... rooting through garbage takes extra time but having advertisements at your site cost almost no extra time
 
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Michie4life said:
But.... rooting through garbage takes extra time but having advertisements at your site cost almost no extra time
It's still an annoyance to your audience. Whether you personally are digging through stinky garbage, or your visitors are subjected to flashy ads, someone has to "work" and "suffer" for the money.
 
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Michie4life said:
I'm not saying it's some magical way to make money, but it would help.

If you're lucky, your site can get an 0.3% click-through rate on advertisements. Most adverts pay a lot less than 50p per thousand clicks (CPM). Therefore you'd need about 300 people to get a single click, and you'd need 300,000 unique page views in order to make 50 pence.

That tallies with what myself and my brother have experienced.

He runs a massively popular website for Scouting (http://www.scoutingresources.org.uk) that often stresses our hosts for bandwidth, disk space, CPU use, etc. It's been running for > 10 years (since I was at uni and set it up for him) and has an enormous regular following and high Google page-ranking (about 50% of the time, higher than the official UK Scouting website for most Scouting-related search terms). We have *never* advertised it, never gamed search engines and never done anything to put it on them since the year 2000 (when I submitted it to one of those "put your link here to get on Altavista's bot-queue" sites - yes, that long ago), it all pure relevance and popularity that get us that high on the Google links. He makes enough to pay hosting, take the kids on a camp or two per year.

I'd be very surprised if all of the OPT websites put together got anywhere near the bandwidth he handles, or unique visitors, or anything else. Hell, he's been approached by almost every tent-manufacturer, Millets-like store, campfire song-book publisher etc. in the country for private advertising at some point - they can't beat the money he makes by a simple set of Google ad's. But advertising is not enough to get *close* to making a dent in his finances. It makes the hosting pay for itself (and our host gives us ENORMOUS discounts for charitable purposes) and gives him a little treat every now and then but that's it.

Even then - what are you going to advertise? Rival products? Beagleboards? The Caanoo? The market is small, the product is niche, the following is quite small too (given that only a few hundreds of people actually have one of the devices - hell, the buying queue is only, what, 4000 people? These forums have 20,000 members in total - that's not a lot and also not a lot of "regular" passing traffic. It's mostly the same people viewing the same forum/news page again and again looking for updates), as is the market potential for them actually having clickable adverts show in their browsers and then clicking them. You might make enough to pay for maybe a Pandora or two before the end of the year. Or you could just make a bigger fuss of advertising Pandora pre-orders, given all these press articles, interviews, etc. and make that in a few minutes. If you got ONE extra pre-order before the end of the year that didn't cancel, it would probably out-do putting advertising on every forum page and website associated with the Pandora.
 
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WizardStan said:
Michie4life said:
But.... rooting through garbage takes extra time but having advertisements at your site cost almost no extra time
It's still an annoyance to your audience. Whether you personally are digging through stinky garbage, or your visitors are subjected to flashy ads, someone has to "work" and "suffer" for the money.
Text ad's? maybe.. cause they are not very annoying, but I get your point and it's true.
 
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WizardStan said:
Extremely successful web comic authors make enough to live on, probably in the neighbourhood of 50000-1000000 US per year.

Off topic, but I would be interested to know who these people are.

On topic;

As long as the adds are not too intrusive.
 
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worzyl said:
WizardStan said:
Extremely successful web comic authors make enough to live on, probably in the neighbourhood of 50000-1000000 US per year.
Off topic, but I would be interested to know who these people are.
Penny Arcade and PvP. At least Scott Kurtz once reported (however long ago it was (googled, it was sometime in 2000)) that he was making enough from advertising that he quit his job and devoted his time entirely to the comic. I remember it because many other comics I was reading at the time tried to do a "me too" money grab (that ultimately failed, in most cases). Gabe and Tycho are in a similar situation, probably even more so since Penny Arcade is ridiculously more popular for some reason. My numbers may have been a little optimistic; maybe a better range would have been 30-60? Basically "enough to live on" by advertisement.
And then they do books and toys and shirts on top of that.
Anywho, point still stands: OPT is hundreds of thousands in debt, and throwing advertisement with a maximum tens of thousands dollar revenue in the absolutely best possible condition would be like tearing down... something big... with something smaller and less suited to the job...
 
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ledow said:
If you're lucky, your site can get an 0.3% click-through rate on advertisements. Most adverts pay a lot less than 50p per thousand clicks (CPM). Therefore you'd need about 300 people to get a single click, and you'd need 300,000 unique page views in order to make 50 pence.
This is the part about Internet advertising that I don't understand.

Do people actually click on those things?
Or do the advertisers just pay to inconvenience users?
 
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Off topic, but a lot of people make enough money off of webcomics to do it full-time - see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-sufficient_webcomics

Bear in mind that web comics make money off of merchandise (including printed volumes, posters, clothes, etc) and donations, not just ads. I don't think OP would make money off of things like this.

I really strongly doubt anyone is making anywhere close to that upper figure of $1m a year. In fact, I imagine many of the self-sufficient artists are even making $50k. It's a labor of love. For instance, I know 8-bit Theater's author has posted that he just barely makes $2k a month, although this was years ago.

It's been pretty well said already, but I think a site like open-pandora.org would barely make anything.
 
Computer savvy people like those who visit these boards probably have ad blockers. That said, I am all for it!
 
I think the loss to OPT in terms of people leaving the site without considering buying a Pandora would be much greater than any money it generated.
 
lulzfish said:
This is the part about Internet advertising that I don't understand.

Do people actually click on those things?

Are you kidding? Hot chicks in my area, want to meet me..... TONIGHT?!!!.

Why wouldn't I follow up a lead like that?!!!


Anyway I think they'd be better off selling merchandise. I wouldn't be seen dead in any Pandora clothing but I'm pretty sure I've read posts from other people who said they would love a tshirt or something.

By selling merchandise, other people are paying YOU for the privilege of advertising your product. Awesomeo
 
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Michie4life said:
WizardStan said:
Michie4life said:
I'm not saying it's some magical way to make money, but it would help.
I could make the same argument for rooting through garbage for discarded beer bottles to take back for a refund (which I used to do as a kid; could easily make $50 a week, which is a fortune to a 10 year old and approximately the same amount they'd make from web advertising :p )
But.... rooting through garbage takes extra time but having advertisements at your site cost almost no extra time

This is the silliest idea ever. Besides being pointless and None-of-our-business, advertisements would just make the OP website look super unprofessional.

You don't pre-order a computer from a company that's so poor they have to put advertising on their homepage.
 
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