I'll start by saying that our previous ad strategy made about half what we need just to keep TSS online. The other half, along with all the costs involved in buying (except for donations from Sega et al) and distributing competition prizes, software purchases such as this forum, and other various expenses, was (or, rather, still is at this point) covered directly by the staff. For the last few months, I've been relying on handouts from I believe three other staff members in order to not go personally bankrupt as well as pay the server bills.
Trust me when I say that the decision to change to a more conspicuous strategy was not taken lightly, and was the subject of a fair bit of discussion by the staff. My motivation as the person in charge of making this work is that no staff member should be out of pocket because of their position, it's not about us trying to get some pocket money.
Secondly, the current situation is a testing phase which will continue until we have a solid setup. The intention is a collection of ads that pays well but doesn't include such questionable material as medical treatment south of the border and the ever-popular "you're a winner". If you'd read my latest status update you'd know that I've already dropped the provider that serves the most questionable ads, regardless of how it'll reduce our revenue by around a third.
I won't, however, apologise for advertising totally legitimate products and services like the aforementioned hotels and robot vacuum cleaners, and I have zero intention of dropping those ads or ads like them. If you're wondering why we don't show more ads for games and the like, those types of ads are normally only served on a Cost Per Click payment model, which as I've already mentioned makes little revenue. The placement near the top of the page is dictated by the current model, which pays on views but falls back to CPC more often if there aren't many clicks. By their nature, being more risky for the advertiser, CPM ads are more flashy with a higher priority on making an impression than on getting clicks necessarily.
To put clicks vs views into perspective, from the current main CPM provider we've had 35,000 paid views in the last week. Those 35,000 ads were clicked 26 times in total, which would have made somewhere in the region of one dollar had it been on a CPC model. People visiting TSS don't click the ads in general, so we can't commit to a CPC model even if it does deliver more attractive material from our viewpoint. On the current model, we're making enough to (once we actually get paid) pay hosting costs and put a modest amount into the site fund for expenses, rainy days and the like.
The text ads from Google are under Svend's control, and he's been out of town for the last week. He may change it, he may not.
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