Ask the Moderators

[Princess Awinita]

[spoilerI've been doing this most of my life, and it is an existential challenge for problems like ours. Wonder how GW made it to its 20th birthday, when most sites like ours (fan sites, not owned by corporations) die out all the time? One of those reasons: advertising.

It's a constant balance between higher-performing ad units and not aggravating your users so far that they employ ad blockers or stop visiting. Ads are annoying by nature. A little annoyance (non-flashing banner ads), most people on the Internet have come to get used to. Terribly annoying (flashing, auto-playing audio, deceptive practices like a "close" button that opens a new window with another ad) are intolerable. So where is the best middle ground?

You see the middle ground I've settled on after 20 years. We need ads if the site is to continue. Banner ads alone no longer pay the bills. (They earn pennies on the dollar -- or less -- compared to 20 years ago.) My rules are no auto-play audio (if that's happening, something is broken); no flashing banner ads; no ads for gross or illegal things (gambling, tobacco, porn, etc.), no pop-ups or pop-unders, and no deceptive practices. The concession on my part is that even this will be too much for a certain percentage of GW visitors, and they'll use an ad blocker. However, the vast majority of the site's traffic actually doesn't come from regulars ... so removing an ad unit will more likely just kill our revenue, rather than gradually improving traffic over time.[/spoiler]

tl;dr - I won't be offended if you use an ad blocker. It's the nature of the Internet in 2020. But you can passively support the site by allowing ads to load.

Where a particular ad unit is actually interfering with your ability to use the site (i.e., it's overlaying something you can't click on), that's something I want to know about so that I can make the user experience more efficient.

The only reason i use adblocker to begin with is to be the frontline defense against malware and viruses that {before getting an adblocker} could easily sneak in and thanks to stupidty on some family members and visitors, messed up 3 compuyers over as many months before figuring out the reason of the virus ion question {ended up getting a laptop that same year and stuck with an adblocker ever since}

Now the part I bolded I truly wish I could do. but thanks to getting hit with malware and trojan viruses over so many years I am flat out paranoid about losing my only computer. HOWEVER I can get to the site just fine with no issues on my tablet {with no adblocker there btw] So I guess with me using my tablet to get here I can support the site via not using an adblocker

Does that help ?

[Annoyed]

I've been doing this most of my life, and it is an existential challenge for problems like ours. Wonder how GW made it to its 20th birthday, when most sites like ours (fan sites, not owned by corporations) die out all the time? One of those reasons: advertising.

It's a constant balance between higher-performing ad units and not aggravating your users so far that they employ ad blockers or stop visiting. Ads are annoying by nature. A little annoyance (non-flashing banner ads), most people on the Internet have come to get used to. Terribly annoying (flashing, auto-playing audio, deceptive practices like a "close" button that opens a new window with another ad) are intolerable. So where is the best middle ground?

You see the middle ground I've settled on after 20 years. We need ads if the site is to continue. Banner ads alone no longer pay the bills. (They earn pennies on the dollar -- or less -- compared to 20 years ago.) My rules are no auto-play audio (if that's happening, something is broken); no flashing banner ads; no ads for gross or illegal things (gambling, tobacco, porn, etc.), no pop-ups or pop-unders, and no deceptive practices. The concession on my part is that even this will be too much for a certain percentage of GW visitors, and they'll use an ad blocker. However, the vast majority of the site's traffic actually doesn't come from regulars ... so removing an ad unit will more likely just kill our revenue, rather than gradually improving traffic over time.

tl;dr - I won't be offended if you use an ad blocker. It's the nature of the Internet in 2020. But you can passively support the site by allowing ads to load.

Where a particular ad unit is actually interfering with your ability to use the site (i.e., it's overlaying something you can't click on), that's something I want to know about so that I can make the user experience more efficient.

Princess Awinita makes an excellent point. Computers and fixing them aren't cheap, and for the non-techies, cleaning them or replacing them requires them to spend money.
Also, there are numerous ad agencies (or whatever businesses like ad choices call themselves) that are willing to take anything as long as they get paid. And this isn't limited to small sites. I'm no longer in the support business, but for the last 3-4 years, yahoo.com and it's associated sites such as yahoo mail were often serving PC repair scams and outright phishing attempts. I even ran into ransomware.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't a conscious choice on yahoo's part, at the time, they were already frequently in the news for their mail user information being hacked, several times over a few years. Their advertising provider wasn't so careful, however.

What if site operators served their ads from their own server? For example, in this case, from adserver.gateworld.net rather than some anonymous, hidden source.
This would give the server operator the opportunity to vet every ad that gets served to ensure that they aren't doing anything untoward.
It would also give the viewer a sense that the content is coming from a trusted source, and they might be more willing to whitelist the domain, and therefore see the ads the site needs for revenue.

Win - Win on both sides.

[ScifigirlSG]

Darren, I use ad blocker because ads take up the whole page I want to view. I don't use a smartphone to access GateWorld just my Windows 10 HP desktop. I also use the McAfee WebAdvisor. Every few months, those get changed out. Ads do show up on my iPad Pro 11 inch with T-Mobile.

[Annoyed]

Darren, I use ad blocker because ads take up the whole page I want to view. I don't use a smartphone to access GateWorld just my Windows 10 HP desktop. I also use the McAfee WebAdvisor. Every few months, those get changed out. Ads do show up on my iPad Pro 11 inch with T-Mobile.

Apple doesn't allow ad blockers to run in Firefox on IOS. Which mean I rarely browse the web on my phone. The ads make it totally unusable.

[GateWorld]

Small sites can't host their own ads, because it is prohibitive for site operators themselves to have to solicit and sell ads, work with advertisers, bill and collect, etc. So we partner with companies that do this professionally, and which also have a strong position in the marketplace by bundling dozens or hundreds of sites in the same vertical category (e.g., Entertainment).

Fortunately I think we have a really terrific partner, which does a great job and -- so far as I've been able to tell -- runs quality ads.

IF you are seeing the old scummy "YOU'VE WON!!!"-style ads, I am reasonably confident they are not coming from us. Check your browser, your extensions, and run a malware scan.

[Annoyed]

IF you are seeing the old scummy "YOU'VE WON!!!"-style ads, I am reasonably confident they are not coming from us. Check your browser, your extensions, and run a malware scan.

You guys definitely had one running for nearly a month last Dec. / January. It purported to be a Google contest, "you've won, please fill this crap out" and was impossible to dismiss w/out closing the browser.

I never saw it anywhere else, and I never saw it on my computers (Firefox, Linux and Windows), only saw it on my iPhone, using Firefox, which, thanks to Apple's stupidity, can't run ad / script blockers.

[Darren]

If you see such ads on GW again, please screencap it and send it to me. I can ask our ad provider to see if it's actually snuck into the rotation. I hate 'em as much as you!

[Annoyed]

If you see such ads on GW again, please screencap it and send it to me. I can ask our ad provider to see if it's actually snuck into the rotation. I hate 'em as much as you!

A screencap on a phone? Is that even possible?

Will do on browsers/computers, but I rarely see issues on them, 'cause I can run blockers on those.

[VampyreWraith]

A screencap on a phone? Is that even possible?

Will do on browsers/computers, but I rarely see issues on them, 'cause I can run blockers on those.

It's possible, I don't know what phone you have, but I can on my phone, I can take screenshots on my iPad too.

[jelgate]

I use my Android to take screenshots all the time.

[VampyreWraith]

Yeah, my phone is an android too. I'm pretty sure you can take screenshots with an iPhone too, since an iPad has the ability to as well.

[SGalisa]

hmmm. About ads. I haven't seen those annoying ads in a lonnnnnnnnnnng time. I just get the stationary GW banner ad for the entire website. My i-phone is another story, tho. Stationary ads don't bother me, unless they're promoting some hideous site. Animated/video ads used to slow down my browser(s), so I'm happy to see the stationary version instead.

[Falcon Horus]

A screencap on a phone? Is that even possible?

How to take a screenshot on any device?

[Annoyed]

I had no idea how to do that. I guess it's an age thing. I've never gotten into using the phone as a computer. Only rarely do I even try to use the web browser. For one thing, the screen is too small to see much. And these things came along long after I became set in my ways as far as using computers go.

Thanks!

[Gatefan1976]

Piss off these side ads like "O'yun.fu" and "play this game" ads that cannot be closed or people will just either leave or put ad/script blockers on which will destroy the whole purpose of these ads.

Revenue, traffic, or content. Make a choice.
Visitors may be your ad driver, but the people who make your content worth viewing are getting jack of it.