I haven't had time to look into the bike-related advertising yet, but I have made progress on other questions.
First, I've added google-ads to the bottom of the individual board pages and thread pages. I hope that these are not too intrusive and are acceptable to most viewers. Their location means that they are generally out of sight except when reading the newest post in a thread. I will let these ads run for a while and see how they "perform"; if the performance does not significantly help the revenue issue for TAY, I will delete them. These ads are actually quite interesting in the way they work: the text content of the page being loaded is analyzed and then google serves up some (hopefully) relevant ads. These are called contextual ads, and the publisher (TAY) gets a commission each time an ad is clicked.
With regards to the idea of devoting a spot in the TRs page header for advertising from businesses that do not participate in commissions programs (e.g. local businesses), I finally found a good script that can rotate through a set of ads, displaying one at a time. The script is elegantly simple, and I've got it set up on the
testing forum
.
This is set up as a demo so that I can let potential advertisers ("sponsors") see how it would work. In this demo there are three sponsors included, each with a slightly different sized graphic. I'd like the keep the graphics limited to the sponsor's logos if I can, rather than displaying typical "banner ads". The script randomly chooses a new ad to display each time a page is loaded, and each ad would be linked to the sponsor's web site (linked right now to a demo page). In the case of Sponsor 1, I've added a demo of how the ad could be alternatively linked to a thread in the "Shop for Gear" board - this is the case when "Logo 1b" is displayed (50% of Sponsor 1's ad displays).
A sponsor would also get their logo displayed at the bottom of each TRs page, along with the other sponsors - this is also in the demo. From looking at other web sites with sponsors, this seems to be common.
There could be some local businesses that would like to have a presence here, but not at the "sponsorship" level. One way they could be accommodated would be to provide them with their own thread in the "Shop for Gear" board, probably for a small monthly fee?
Assuming that the type of advertising shown in this demo is generally acceptable to TRs users, there's one main issue left to resolve, and that's what rate to charge for sponsorships. I will be looking into this question, but if there are any TRs posters whose non-skiing lives give them knowledge on this issue, I'd love your input. I have compiled some web stats for the site but don't have much experience in assessing what they actually mean.
Greg, take a look at the demo and let me know what you think.
