Noticing A Problem With Ad Loading?

[perpetualrabbit]

Lol... this is somewhere between funny - and arrogant (not only reduce Phoronix ad revenue, but rub it in his face as well)

In his defence:
* if I do not use a blocker, I get usually three ads on the phoronix site, top left and right.
* All three use flash, and CPU use goes way up.
* They take ages to load and firefox blocks (goes gray when using Compiz) for sometimes over a minute.
* The ads are not in the slightest on target. Why is there no add for Amazon, or Thinkgeek or something geek or technology related. I facebook there is an option to click ads away and give a reason, i.e. not interested, irrelevant, obscene etc. They use this to give personalized somewhat relevant ads. If Phoronix is dependant on ads revenue, then find an ad company that is better in targeting the phoronix public. I block ads because they are simply too intrusive and make the site unusable for me sometimes, or worse.
* Some of the ads for some diet thing displayed bare-chested young men, leading people to think I was viewing some kind of gay site. Nothing wrong with people who are homosexual, but I don't want people to think I'm watching gay sites. These ads just make phoronix not save to watch at work anymore sometimes.
* The flash ads are so simple, that I don't see the point of using flash for it at all. They could simply have been pictures.

[dcc24]

Please, do -just- that. I'd love to see the reaction of the users here.

But fact is, you know and it's a given that the majority of people here are technical users who use adblock and/or other measures of blocking ads. I don't think I'd be far off to bet that it's not you're waiting until you get tired of AdBlock usage, you're actually afraid many people would stop visiting the website if you forced it on them in such a base method as you just described. You don't want to provoke such a reaction.

Any way you see it, a user has the right to filter any content he downloads -into- his computer. You could contraargue that a server admin has the right to filter any users he wishes, but you would agree with me it's impossible to do that.

It's a given that your financial model isn't working (you've cared to notice it yourself several times). Why not change to the wikipedia model, which is obviously working? I'd be the first to donate if you drop this premium content / ads crap.

This.

As the "Humble Indie Bundle" (google it) has proven, Linux users tend to donate nicely to stuff they support. The ads are crap, especially those which convert article text into mouseover ads.

At the very least, try the donation-based approach and see if that works for you. FWIW, I'll be one of the first to donate.

[Michael]

This.

As the "Humble Indie Bundle" (google it) has proven, Linux users tend to donate nicely to stuff they support. The ads are crap, especially those which convert article text into mouseover ads.

At the very least, try the donation-based approach and see if that works for you. FWIW, I'll be one of the first to donate.

There is donation support, see second to last paragraph - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODA3NA

[MartjeB]

Why don't you just put up a donate-button in the right-top and remove all the advertisements? Try it for a month or so; if it doesn't work out, put the ads back on.

I hate looking at naked men trying to sell me steroids, sigh.

[Hoodlum]

I'm sure Michael gets it. No one likes ads but lets be realistic here.

Ars Technica, one of the most popular tech sites ever, tried a purely "premium subscriber"-based approach. Even with a large amount of content and huge reader ship they barely managed to get over 1000 subscribers. They were forced to revert, people simply don't value such content enough to warrant this type of model. See the massively declining newspaper business for another example.

It would be incredibly arrogant to suggest he should change his entire business model on a whim. I'm sure he has already looked at all the options. We are not going to give him an epiphany suggesting something else. Looking at previous attempts of these "other business models" for this type of site it would be (imo) very likely to fail.

It seems far more reasonable (and productive) approach might be to voice concern over the types of ads that make us block them and what would make people reconsider adding Phoronix to your exempt list.


So here are my suggestions:

1) As stated before intelliTXT is essentially my most hated type of ad. It makes copying a passage of text and linking someone a pain and annoyance. Meaning less views for you. Removing them for logged-in forum members is great imo and I appreciate it. However, as someone previously suggested, would it be possible to have a site account linked to your forum account? This way we would not have to log into the forums before viewing an article to remove it? Other ads would still be displayed, obviously.

2) The other thing that (mainly) bothers me is the large ad in the article text which often pushes the content I want out of the way.I just think having an ad here is bad practice, it is usually flashing (and animated) and quite distracting. There are already ads at the top bottom and both sides and combined those do not nearly irritate me as much as this one ad does.

3) Flash. This one is an issue I see other people mentioned also. The animated flash ads that run are both highly distracting and more importantly absolutely destroy battery life. On Linux this issue is worse than anywhere else. I realise this is no fault of your own but it is a big issue for the very people your site targets.

4) Topless ads. Although not a concern for me, this seems to really bother some people. It is clear it would be in your interest to remove anything that risks offending users. Some people have mentioned that they stopped visiting your site at work because of this. I am sure they are not alone. This issue is harming your ad revenue.

My least-hated types of ads:

1) Text (Google ads for example)

2) Static Images

3) If absolutely unavoidable simple, non-flashing animated ads. A static background colour is a must. This alone makes them 1000x more acceptable.

I realise some of these pay revenue on a per click basis and you likely require ads on a per-view basis, but would it not be possible to have more relevant adverts? Technology, games, whatever. This would at least eliminate a large number of adverts people seem to really dislike.

To conclude I'd like to make clear that if i gave the impression I was complaining for the sake of complaining I appologise. I honestly do believe, however, that some of the ads displayed will (and do) put people off using the site. Either in general or in public and it is in both of our interests to have adverts that are both less irritating to the reader (higher chance of returning / viewing the site at work / in public) and provide you with more views (and thus revenue).

[Vegar]

I used to be a premium member, simply because I wanted to support this great site and read multi-page articles in one page, and the membership had the benefit of hiding the ads.

However, I use an RSS reader to get all the news and I usually load three or four phoronix articles in my browser before reading them. This caused my browser to load the standard ad-blown, 90-pages-per-article phoronix because I wasn't logged in to the forums. So to get rid of the ads, I had to click the forums link, then go back and reload all the articles. Quite a hassle, I might as well just ditch the RSS reader.

I posted about it in the premium-only forum, and someone (Mikael, IIRC) said he was going to look into it. It still hasn't happened, and I won't consider renewing my subscription until it does.

I am sure it is just a matter of including the right php file from the forums in scan.php or whatever file is used to present the articles.

Lately, the ads have become so annoying that I had to install adblock for the sole purpose of blocking ads from phoronix. You are driving your readers away with the kontera/intelliTXT ads. I usually stay clear off most websites that have annoying hover-on-text popups, and I am sure I'm not the only one.

The premium-only forum thread in question can be found here:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12538

Can any of the premium members confirm that this is still an issue?

[Michael]

I used to be a premium member, simply because I wanted to support this great site and read multi-page articles in one page, and the membership had the benefit of hiding the ads.

However, I use an RSS reader to get all the news and I usually load three or four phoronix articles in my browser before reading them. This caused my browser to load the standard ad-blown, 90-pages-per-article phoronix because I wasn't logged in to the forums. So to get rid of the ads, I had to click the forums link, then go back and reload all the articles. Quite a hassle, I might as well just ditch the RSS reader.

I posted about it in the premium-only forum, and someone (Mikael, IIRC) said he was going to look into it. It still hasn't happened, and I won't consider renewing my subscription until it does.

I am sure it is just a matter of including the right php file from the forums in scan.php or whatever file is used to present the articles.

Lately, the ads have become so annoying that I had to install adblock for the sole purpose of blocking ads from phoronix. You are driving your readers away with the kontera/intelliTXT ads. I usually stay clear off most websites that have annoying hover-on-text popups, and I am sure I'm not the only one.

The premium-only forum thread in question can be found here:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12538

Can any of the premium members confirm that this is still an issue?

The current way to bypass this is to use the Phoronix Forums New Articles' RSS Feed, which will take you through the forum link to get to the article while initializing your forum account in the process.

[Michael]

I realise some of these pay revenue on a per click basis and you likely require ads on a per-view basis, but would it not be possible to have more relevant adverts? Technology, games, whatever. This would at least eliminate a large number of adverts people seem to really dislike.

The problem is there isn't enough targeted Linux ads to serve up for the page views that we do... In just a few days of the month we usually exhaust the ad budgets / impression orders of the relevant advertisers (RH, Novell, IBM, etc) so then the ad providers go on to try to serve other technology and other high-paying ads.

[Michael]

Why don't you just put up a donate-button in the right-top and remove all the advertisements? Try it for a month or so; if it doesn't work out, put the ads back on.

That's really not viable especially in the long-term -- relying on donations would bring in less revenue than ads. About the only alternative to using ads + subscription service at Phoronix would be having the commercial subsidiary of the Phoronix Test Suite financing the Phoronix Media web presence upstream, but that probably wouldn't pan out well for some time and then there would be the complaints of users that the Phoronix.com sole source of revenue is being derived from many of the companies that we cover on the site.

[Vegar]

The current way to bypass this is to use the Phoronix Forums New Articles' RSS Feed, which will take you through the forum link to get to the article while initializing your forum account in the process.

Where can this special RSS feed be found? And will there be a proper solution in place?