Advertisement reports and annoyances

People coming from google into our archives will get popups, whereas people who surf directly to our domain (http://club.cdfreaks.com or http://www.cdfreaks.com for mainpage) will get almost no popups (an occasional one perhaps, that is what this thread is for).

People who come here through Google are usually people who are in for a quick answer and don't plan to stick around for a long time. We need finances too in order to pay for the servers and bandwidth. Since we don't like to bother our regular and loyal visitors too much with this (as little as possible even), the popups have been setup for those one-time visitors, they help keeping this forum free from popups for the regulars.

To conclude my reply, if you use any of the two above-specified links, you should have no problems with popups and see that we are not as bad as you think we are.

Hope you can understand our position.

I'm sorry but that is the MOST STUPID thing I have ever heard.

So apparently you do not expect, or even want?, people from search engines to bookmark you. Because when you bombard them with popups, you can be sure that they won't.

I operate an adult website, http://www.AdultSite-Review.com, who had 7.5 million hits (172000 unique visitors) in September, I only started it in January 2003, I make money and I do NOT have a single popup or misleading link.

With enough visitors, eventually somebody is going to buy a product from one of your sponsors, and you make a commision.

Why did you even bother submitting your site to Google and other search enigines, if you think the visitors that's coming from there are lowlife scum?

I see it the exactly opposite - The traffic I get from search engines are high quality traffic, that is much better conversion rate for sales. And that's because they actually were searching and looking for answers, and my site had those answers, same as yours have the answer to people questions when they come from search engines. I have found that a LOT more visitors coming from search engines are bookmarking my site.

I really like this website, and I come and read the news every weekday morning. With more people bookmarking your site, gradually you will make more sales, even without a single annoying popup - trust me...

Keep up the good work - not popup work

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Last edited by DKDiveDude; 14-10-2003 at 15:08.

Unfortunately the adult business can't be compared to what we are doing. I think in the adult business there are more people willing to take their creditcards, and are less people annoyed by banners (because they mainly contain good looking women). The people on our site don't click much banners, and are even suspicious to click affliate links. Also there are less companies with affiliate programs then in the adult business, and we also receive less comission (%). In the adult business commissions of 60% are possible and recurring, we have to do one time sales at 10 to 20%.

We have tried many ways and I think we have currently a good compromis. Search engine traffic gets the popups, and is offered a link to a popup free site. Our daily visitors only get a little advertising in exchange.

We have tried different setups and there are not substantial more people converting to registered users when there are no popups, and there are even less people buying with less popups. The current setup seems to work very well and is not annoying to our beloved active and daily visitors and staff, but it does pay the bills.

Wrong. Big mistake. All surfers, not only those coming from Goole, are in for a "quick answer", me including! Does that mean you have to "punish" them with a torrent of pop-ups?

Let's look back for a while:

I was in the AMANDA users mailing list for a "quick answer". I ended up writing 200+ messages helping others find their way with this excellent backup tool and writing an article on Using AMANDA to backup vfat filesystems.

I found nukeforums from Google, while I was looking for a "quick answer" to a PHP-Nuke problem. I ended up writing 600+ messages, translating and maintaining the PHP-Nuke HOWTO, opening my PHP-Nuke forum myself, while continuing my engagement for the nukeforums every day.

I found cdfreaks, while I was looking for a "quick answer" to an image format question. I was bombarded with pop-ups, got pissed off and banned cdfreaks.com with my proxy forever (this being the first time I felt so complelled to do it).

Guess who lost a valuable member of his community.

You seem to have a very small amount of referrals from search engines to be willing to annoy them up to disgust - yes, actually up to the point they swear they will never come back!

A big THANK YOU to DKDiveDude, for bringing the real marketer's point of view to the discussion. I've done quite a deep diving in online marketing this last year, but I couldn't have put it better than DKDiveDude did. Think about his arguments again.

And then we have the technology question: with Mozilla offering pop-up suppression, with the Google Toolbar doing the same in the new version and with many more software vendors to follow, how long do you think your pop-ups are going to "pay the bills"? One year?

Not more. What are you going to do then? Affiliate programs are feeling the pressure of Google's AdSense (and Overture's similar program that started lately), and they are already not an option, as you admit yourself. Pop-ups will be dead through pop-up suppression being active as per default on all browsers. And you are right, who clicks on banners today, unless there is some beautiful, inviting woman on it?

What will remain then? Context-driven advertisement. Why not start now? I will repeat it, go with AdSense, just try it (you can stop it every moment you like), you will be impressed. It's because it's *relevant*.

By the way, just out of curiosity, how much are we talking about? Currently, in Germany, you can have PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, 25 GB traffic, 500MB storage for $20 per month. If you are willing to pay $35, you get 1GB storage and 50GB traffic. Do you need more than that? How many sessions and pageviews do you have? I guess more than my homepage forum. Then how come that I almost cover half my expenses with AdSense, while you fear that you will not?

Come back to reality, cdfreaks, before reality freaks the CD out of you.

Apparently your proxy server doesn't block us very well, while you're still here. Nice

CD Freaks receives currently over 120.000 visitors a day, we run 3 servers and take about 5 Mbit a month, I think you can imagine that it costs a lot of money. We can't do any virtual hosting because we use too much CPU resources. Currently all three servers (P4 2.x Ghz - ranging from 2.2 to 2.5 and all with 1 GB of RAM) have loads of 1.+ on most times, so you can understand we're very different from your personal website.

I don't understand your comments on Google Adsense, if you look properly at every page on this forum, you would have noticed that we are already using it. Unfortunately people over here don't like to click banners. I have done much research as well, and being the webmaster of THIS page, I think my research is the more relevant, and at the moment this is our way to go. However I'm trying to get rid of the Everyone.net (which sometimes does gator pops ) and FastClick pops and exchange them to 1 better paying. This should reduce the amount of popups at the page load on our archive to 3, with a session limit.

I also think we have made it pretty clear that with one click you can find our 'normal' forum, which is popup free and I think the system works very well. Too bad it annoys you, but we can't satisfy every of our 120.000 visitors, to us the most important thing is to be loyal to those who have been contributing for a long time over here and I think we save them a lot of ads this way. And from the 60.000 people a day we receive from Google, there have only be 10 or less complaining.(that's 10 out of 1.8 million a month)

How much we would like it, but there's more to it then making visitors happy. Bills have to be paid.

I see. You did a really god job in integrating Google's ads in your theme - that's why I didn't even notice them. Perhaps you should make them spring to the eye just a little bit more.

It's a pity such a good site has to resort to pop-ups to cover its expenses.

Proxy restrictions had to wait a little to finish this conversation. However, they will take effect, as soon as I post this.

Good luck.

Google toolbar'll sort out the ads problem.

It can help, but where do we then get our money from?
The money it takes to keep all three servers up and running...it doesn't come cheap....

Or do you feel like paying for access? That is the last thing we want here....

What's the deal with the advert on the front page (for some sort of games site) that wants to make you pay for a super long distance (possible international) phone call. Luckily I read it before clicking yes to it, but someone who didn't could end up with a huge phone bill. Please try and do something about it.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

"Hi there ! My name is Tina !"

Tina screamed through my speakers @ work and for some time i was the laughing stock of my colleagues who thought i was surfing porn on the corporate network.

Could Tina please be prohibited from speaking on a cdfreaks front page advertisement ever again ?

It's not that i dislike Tina , but i do dislike advertisements which use sounds.

A very annoying ad via adsense is currently blocking access to the search function and buddy list (not that I have any ) the search function for example drops down behind the ad and I've twice now got redirected to the advertisers site and have given up on my search.

Enforced ad-clicking, is this the next step to guarantee revenue?

What are they thinking?

OK, so pop-up blockers are not fool proof. They can be fooled. And right now CDfreaks is fooling the MS popup blocker. But WHY in heavens-name would an advertizer want to fool a popup blocker? If I install and switch on a popup blocker, how likely am I to ever read, let alone click on a popup ad that sneaks through? How likely am I to EVER sign up for Net-Flix, after they popped-under CDfreaks several times?

For now I have just added ads.cdfreaks.com to the list of Restricted Sites in IE, Tools, Options, Internet Options, Security.

If it gets worse, I will just leave.

Wd

Why put the stupid floating banner over the search options? Find a new location quit hiding the options under the banner. My complaint isn't that their is an ad it's that it blocks functionality of the site itself.

I don't know about anyone else, but Flash ads do my head in. Others I can happily cope with.

Today, there's nothing but Flash ads (coming from Google), where before there were nice text-based ones.

I use Kapersky Internet Security Suite and there is an option to disable Banner ads. It works perfectly on all these ads in CDF. I do beleive that most A/V and Firewall programs have this option now.

norton internet security 2005 have this feature, but NIS 2007 not

Can you tell me which party is advertising? Since those ads different for each page and each country, unfortunately, we cannot check every ad.

Anyway it is ofcouse not our intention to block functionality of the site/forum. I haven't noticed any of these ads on my computer yet, but we will look into it & might change the positions a bit.

The flash ones seem to come from http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com - the ads themselves are different each time.

I've gotten round it by disabling the Flash plugin in IE, as the ads themseves give me a headache, and they're distracting.

As I said, the other ones, such as the text-based ones, are fine.

An observation...mostly just amusing, but should be of interest the administrators...

Seems to me that the Google-powered ads that appear at the top of the freaks forum are based on the frequency of key words in the posts themselves...which I guess is why I noticed this just now...

Challenge: can you work out what the key words may be?