Ok, so next month (sometime between the 1st or the 3rd) we will begin to roll out ads on the forums. As discussed we will be using Google Adsense for this. We will test ads for 3 months keeping an eye on user feedback and revenue generation. To assist with this we have created a new subcategory #forum:ads which will be used for feedback, discussion, and reporting ads that users think should not be on the site.
We are setting the bar fairly low and will define the experiment as successful if we can meet the minimum payout threshold of $100 a month. If we do not meet this requirement we will not run at least generic ads on the forums and reserve the ad system for community ads only.
Ads will only be seen at the top and bottom of the site. We debated also having in topic ads that show every 25 posts but we feel this would harm the user experience to much and we are just looking at supplementing our income, not optimizing our revenue.
Patreons of $5 teir or above will not see ads as a new benefit.
Finally, we plan on sharing as much data about this experiment as possible with the community hoping that even if it fails we can provide some valuable insight and data to those who may be looking at doing an ad driven game of some sort.
We would like to thank everyone who provided their feedback on this to us! Many great insights where shared with us and we where happy to see how many people wanted to help support the site in any way they can.
10 Likes
Will Patreons be able to see ads if they want to? I’ve been one for a while, but I’d quite like to see how the ads are integrated into the site (yeah, I know, I’m a masochist 
)
1 Like
Lol if you want to see the ads feel free to message me and we can just leave you off the group
Hm, there is a lot of free space on left and right side instead of top and bot. Isn’t it better to place tons of adds on this free space?
3 Likes
That space seems to be depending on your computer, the space there for me barely exists.
There are two main reasons the ads do not run in that empty space.
-
The plugin we are using (the official plugin by the discourse team) does not support ads in that empty space
-
That empty depends on the width of the monitor viewing it. This makes ads there not very responsive as on smaller screens and devices the amount of open space will change or completely disappear. Banner ads tends to be more responsive and work better at most if not all screen sizes.
Has there been discussion on having user submitted and funded ads? I know TFGames.site appears to have something of the sorts set up. I figure it would become more valuable for developers and users as the site continues to grow.
1 Like
Yes, but only minor discussion of it thus far. We have planned on opening up to community use from the very start though (it was one of the reasons we wanted to try to go through with it), but we do not want to do it immediately as we want to get some clean data on running it with an ad service provider first.
