SF-FANDOM ADVERTISING OPTIONS CHANGING 2021
Michael > January 12th, 2021, 02:29 PM
Later this year, Google's AdSense network will disable their "link" ads, which thus far have proven to be the only acceptable ad format for our forum members.
The forums are one of the most popular sites on our server. Most visitors only lurk, reading the discussions, which is fine.
We don't earn much from the advertising compared to other sites with comparable or less traffic. So losing the AdSense link ads won't be a disaster for us. Because of the way we amortize our costs, we spend about $1/month on hosting for the forums. It's really NOT a big deal for us.
Still, transitioning away from the old VBulletin software - and my struggles with health over the past couple of years - means we lost some other methods of monetization, as well as some special functions I had set up.
While my health is greatly improved, I have a huge backlog of work to catch up on. Other software systems we use are also evolving, and I need to take care of a lot of maintenance.
So when the time comes we'll remove the AdSense code. Maybe a little sooner. If we don't, I fear Google will use that code to inject different ad formats into the forums. We've already had complaints about what the forums look like with alternative ad formats.
I cannot control where AdSense displays the injected ads, or even how many ads it displays. People complain about AdSense on several of our sites. I've tried reducing the ad load and it doesn't seem to affect anything.
So, going forward, later this year we'll have to experiment with new forms of advertising.
I will post follow up information in THIS discussion when that time comes. I don't have any idea (as I write this) of when that will be.