So boys and girls, in the interests of transparency, let’s tell you how all this works. At least what I’m able to figure out and where we are at. Why? Because we hear you on the bad ads.
When we first started this, we did a web site that was shared hosting on GoDaddy. It was reasonably cheap but we weren’t prepared for how much traffic we got initially. We upgraded, which gets a bit more expensive however GoDaddy sucks, so we needed to move to a better hosting company.
I looked long and hard for a good web hosting company that wasn’t Amazon. Even after I picked something, we STILL needed to upgrade to our own server, thanks to you lovely people coming to see us. That’s not cheap. Then we needed to buy all sorts of plugins for the site to make it faster. There’s still some things I don’t have quite right as I’m an old Windows guy and not a Linux expert. Caching, media organizers, SEO plugins, etc. So the costs have gone up and we needed to generate revenue.
Welcome to the wonderful world of advertising.
Obviously we aren’t big enough to have monthly memberships or anything like that. I’m not really big on that model anyway. We started with Google Adsense. Google didn’t get big by giving away money. They pay poorly and we needed to look around for a third party.
The company we landed on does pay the bills and are fairly responsive but their ads were getting more and more intrusive, to the point where we turned them off back in late November after you guys told us it really didn’t work for you.
After working with them, I turned it back on earlier this week. I wanted less intrusive ads and for the most part it was ok.
Until the last two days. The Google “You Win!” ads are really bad. So I will work with them one more time and if it doesn’t change, we will part ways with them. We are looking at various other companies and thanks to the increase in traffic, we might qualify for some much better quality companies.
I write all this, as I said, in the interests of transparency. Some of you contribute articles, many more of you have been long time readers and commenters, and some of you are brand new. The crew here all agree that we never want to adopt the ways of most sites and big tech: “Shut up, we don’t have to tell you anything.”
Bull. You are are customers, our community and our friends. I like that this place is the net equivalent of the local bar (or pub for you Brits.) We come in, we argue, we laugh, but we know each other and if there’s a problem with place, you deserve to know why and what we are doing about it.
So thanks for your patience and know we are working towards a solution.
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