We’re playing around with ads at the moment. You may or may not see them and they may show up in different places and differ between desktop and mobile. Please be patient. After we figure out what is possible and what the ads look like we’ll better be able to answer questions and respond to comments.
I’ll hold off full comment until you all have tested things, just want to note that I would prefer no ads.
I have not donated yet because funds didn’t seem to be needed and I didn’t want to lose $ to Patreon fees, but would be willing to do so if this is a funding issue.
There are several things which have been discussed, including the possibility of no ads for donors (and imo if we do that, and I’m not really for it, the threshold for “donor” should be extremely low, but I’m not necessarily against ads. I think viewing ads can be seen as a user’s contribution, but tiers of people based on donation is antithetical to my purpose/interests here. But, like if the threshold is super low, then maybe nbd. (those are all my thoughts strictly as a site user - not in any capacity as managing the ads or w/e)
Anyway, at the moment I’m seeing “ADVERTISEMENT” at the top of topics pages and probably any of you without ad blockers are seeing it too. (I didn’t see it at first, but disabled my blocker for this site) There was a notice from AdSense that something was wrong in some code here, which I changed, but it says it can take up to a few days for them to recognize the change. That may be why we just get a placeholder for the ad. Anyway, it may stay like that for a bit while I/we see if it changes on its own.
We currently have enough funding to pay for hosting, but we don’t really have any way to compensate the people who are doing the work. Personally, I would be extremely uncomfortable trying to draw any sort of salary from donations and I wouldn’t even know what would be fair to charge. But if ad revenue is distributed to the workers, it sidesteps a lot of those questions and we just get whatever the advertising brings in.
If we’re really lucky the revenue that ads are likely to bring in right now is maybe a couple bucks a day, and I’d expect the people doing the work to be like, “lol, let’s ship it to Marianne Williamson!”. However, even if it never brings in enough for anybody to care, I would like to at least have it established that it is OK for staff to be paid.
I don’t need to be paid to keep doing what I’ve been doing, and I don’t really expect this place to ever generate a lot of money. But if it ever does become possible for the people who set this up and keep it going to be paid a fair wage, I would like the precedent and mechanism for it to be established now.
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Just testing if that’s a joke or not. Is adblocker censored?
Just whitelisted here. Will report anything I see.
That’s fair. Fwiw I would be absolutely OK with donations going directly to the people that helped set this up (I do think they deserve compensation) but understand your position.
No one has seen an actual ad have they?
I should be home most of Wednesday and will check back on AdSense then.
Bob’s yer uncle
lol first ad I see is for annuities, second is about gun rights.
I got “shop halo rings”. Really off target with that.
AdSense account balance: $0.00
Just saw my first. Tire Rack .com
Are these the default ads or has Adsense already profiled us?
I did nothing to select the kinds of ads. I suspect they (computers obv) are reading our content and attempting to send us ads that they think will get clicked on.
I’ve seen Gastric Sleeve Surgery ads a couple times. Googlebot probably knows that I’ve been reading jbro’s thread. Also, the ad is for a place in California. Googlebot is all knowing.
Haha, I just got a hearing aids ad. I wonder if Googlebot actually thinks we’re a bunch of olds.
I appreciate you taking money from the NRA…
This is probably going to be a bit of a problem since it seems google wants to send us ads based on what we talk about and we talk about stuff we hate. There are a couple of ways to filter ads on adsense. One is blocking sites that ads link to. Another is some kind of tool that I just enabled, but it tells me to check back in an hour and see if it’s available.
Anyway, someone somewhere should probably discuss objectionable ads and we should see what we can do about it.