Advertising on TAY: your ideas wanted

First, the prefunctory: This site was one of the reasons I moved to this area (great ad for the PNW!) and has been an ongoing source of inspiration and education almost every day since. It's invaluable.

Second, part of my ski addiction is gear and scouring every available source to find it cheaply. While I frequently go the local retailers first, the Web plays a large role. Right now, when I'm looking for a good list of online retailers to browse (and potentially for discounts), I go to Ttips's "sponsors" list. It's pretty much the only reason I visit that site. I've never found their approach gaudy or annoying and would love to drive clicks through a site like this that I value as a resource instead (already scored some skis using the REI pass-through here!).

On the other hand, Dawson's site has a ton of blinking ads at the top that *appear* to slow load times. There are also scripts on that page which means it can't be viewed easily on my smartphone, which means I don't visit much.

Advertising on this site wouldn't bother me. If it's gear-related, I'd use them as an additional resource and would seek to drive traffic through this site to those third parties simply to support this site. And if we start seeing some TAY discount codes, my checking account will be in trouble!!!

Thank you for all your work with this amazing site.

I am going to guess that one of the major operating expenses for Turns-All-Year is paying for web hosting.

Thanks for your suggestion of self-hosting. I think that on the balance this wouldn't make much sense in this case, though. Web hosting has gotten to be relatively cheap these days, with competition and economies of scale. In fact, phone service for TAY costs more per year than web hosting, and I got the cheapest phone service I could find! For the price of hosting I am free from having to be concerned about server maintenance, security, upgrades, etc., and instead can spend that time on the site itself. To run TAY, the business, involves a variety of expenses, more than I imagined. None are huge, but they add up. The business has to have everything it needs to function without mingling with the personal side of my life.

andyski, glad to hear that you were able to use the REI pass-through. I like the idea that people can go look at the gear ads if they choose to do so. It's a little early to tell how much these types of ads can produce for TAY, and I'm still working on figuring out how local shops could be represented here, both for their sake and in case it's necessary for TAY. This may entail non-view optional ads, but be assured that pages will not end up framed in wall-to-wall ads as on wildsnow (not only the top, but way down the left side too). Maybe I'm not a typical consumer or ad target, but packing in the ads that way does not have the intended effect on me.

For other gear sellers that could go in the view-optional gear board, which ones would be worthwhile adding? For the affiliate program I've already signed up with, I can add:
-- e-OMC (Oregon Mountain Community, semi-local?);
-- altrec.com (I know nothing about them);
-- Moosejaw (same);
-- Sierra Trading Post (not exactly cutting edge gear, but some good deals at times on last year's overstocks).
-- any others that should be considered?

-- altrec.com (I know nothing about them);

I have used Altrec.com a few times and they have been great. They are headquartered in Oregon, so local to some TAYers. I would be happy to see a link to their site if they wanted to playball.

I know a lot of the TAY crowd bikes in the summer months.  Perhaps one of the bigger online bike stores?  performancebike.com, or some other site like that?  Trying to think year-round revenue

Both sites would be a good addition:

e-OMC (Oregon Mountain Community)
altrec.com

Thanks for the feedback on other gear stores. I will work on adding pages for e-OMC and altrec.com. I just checked and performancebike.com is part of the affiliate program, so I will apply for TAY to have a "relationship" with them.