Advertising on TAY: September update

I'd like to give an update on the issue of advertising here on TAY. We had a very useful discussion about this in the spring (the thread is here ), and I've implemented some of the ideas discussed. Here's what has been happening since then:

(1) Affliate ads: these generate a commission for TAY when someone (a) clicks a retailer's ad, and then (b) makes a purchase from that retailer. Instead of blanketing the forum with affiliate ads, they have been segregated into their own board (Shop for Gear), making them "view-optional". This way of running the affiliate ads meets one of my main goals for any advertising, which is to minimize the distraction it presents to forum visitors (this goal is, of course, completely contrary to the point of advertising, which is to get people's attention). The results of affiliate advertising so far: people have been using ads to make purchases, with the average over the five months these have been running being about $55/month. There's no way to know how consistent this will be, but it is a helpful amount, and I don't have to spend a whole lot of time now that the affiliate threads are set up. I have been trying to update threads with major promotions. REI and backcountry.com have been the most active for purchases, with STP and Zazzle (shirts) pretty far behind, OMC and Amazon hardly used, and no purchases through altrec.com.

(2) Google ads: these generate a commission for TAY when someone clicks on an ad ("no purchase required"). These ads are not "view-optional", and TAY has no control over the ads displayed (they are "contextual ads" that are served up based on the text content of the page on which they will be displayed). I have never liked these ads when I have seen them on other sites (and they are everywhere now), and seeing them in action on TAY I don't like them here either. Many of the ads that I've seen served here are questionably related to this forum, and they clearly fail the distraction-minimization goal. I placed these ads in a way to lessen their obtrusivness, however, by putting them at the bottom of board and thread pages, but this obviously decreases their potential for generating commissions. These ads have been generating an average of about $24/month from about 50 ad clicks/month.

(3) Yard Sale board: suggested donation when a sale is made. I don't think this has led to any donations beyond the person who originally suggested it.

(4) Donations: made using the TAY donation page. These have averaged about $85/month for the first 9 months of the year. There is very little pattern to donations, month to month and year to year, except that there are some people who donate every year. We previously discussed the possibility of a "donation drive" but I have not done anything with that at this point.

(5) Sponsorship: this is a form of advertising with a much more direct connection between the publisher (TAY) and the advertiser ("sponsor") than for the commission-based arrangements above (read: no middleman). TAY gets paid for running the ads, with no clicking or purchasing required on the part of forum visitors (although the advertisers obviously hope that people will click on the ads and visit their web sites). A negative of sponsorships is that the ads cannot be "view-optional" and have to be placed where visitors will see them if there is going to be any value for the sponsors. Positives are that TAY has much better control over the ads that will run and, with longer term sponsorships, TAY gets a reliable revenue stream. I started working on this as a possiblility last spring, not knowing how the other types of advertising would work out. My idea was to give local shops a chance to have a presence here, which is not a possibility with the affiliate advertising. A number of shops indicated interest, and after I finally figured out how a sponsorship program would actually work, four of them have committed to 12 month sponsorships. Rates for this type of advertising seem to be treated as semi-proprietary so I should probably not be posting them, but I can say that the income they will produce is slightly above the projected 12 month expenses for TAY.
    The 12 month sponsorship program starts Oct. 1 (may start running a few days early to make sure everything is working properly). I have tried to balance the need of the sponsors for exposure with my goal of keeping advertising as unobtrusive as possible. The sponsor "ads" will not be traditional web ads, but rather sponsor logos (no animation) which link to their sites. There will be a single spot in the forum header (top left, under TAY logo) that rotates the logos of the four sponsors, loading a new logo whenever a new page is loaded, one logo per page. This is the "obtrusive" part of the advertising. In the forum footer will be a static display of all four sponsor logos/links. Finally, each sponsor will get their own thread in the Shop for Gear board, which they can update on a reasonable basis; these threads will be "view-optional" as with the affiliate threads in that board but will let the sponsors put in a lot more content than a simple banner ad. I'm hoping that overall this sponsorship program is fairly tasteful and will not change the look-and-feel of the forum too much.

The sponsorship program should bring in enough revenue to cover TAY expenses with a small cushion, and best of all be very predictable, so I would like to discontinue some of the other revenue producers:
(1) Google ads: get rid of them because I don't like much of what gets served up and I think they are kind of tacky.
(2) Yard Sale board: get rid of the "suggested donation" text that appears for someone starting a new thread in this board - no point in running it if nobody wants to donate.
(3) Donations: either discontinue taking donations altogether, or clearly let people know that they are not needed at this time (there may be some people who really want to make a donation).
(4) Affiliate ads in Shop for Gear board: this gets a little more complicated. At least one of the TAY sponsors would like for their online affiliate competitors to be removed, so that this board becomes a "TAY Sponsors" board. I'm willing to do that, but it may be that some forum visitors like to be able to use the ads and deals contained within the affiliate threads. A compromise would be to remove the affiliates that don't really get used, keep the ones that do (e.g. REI and backcountry.com) or that don't sell ski/outdoor gear (Zazzle, Amazon), but have all of the sponsor's threads stay at the top of the board so they are more prominent.  Another possibility would be to move the affliates off the forum to a separate page. I'm definitely open to suggestions on this question.

Feedback encouraged (and sorry for such a long post)!

Personally, I've learned to ignore Google Ads, so I don't see the need to drop them. If they bother you, however, it's your board... Agree on the yard sale board. I don't have much feelings about the Shop for Gear board -- those are as unobtrusive as it gets, but if sponsors don't like them, it doesn't seem like a good idea to annoy the sponsors.

As far as donations, I don't think anybody on this board would fault you for taking in more than your monthly costs to run the board. Surely you haven't yet recovered your initial setup costs, or the investment in time? We're all aware that TAY isn't a profitable day job, but that doesn't mean outflow must exceed inflow every month. I think it's perfectly reasonable to accept donations, as long as you don't pitch some whiny sob story about "TAY will shut down if you don't donate NOW!" (which some sites have been claiming for years). A donation drive would be tacky if sponsors were covering all your costs, but I feel it's always OK to accept donations, and to have a link politely offering a place to do so.

All good Charles, though I agree with Lord H that you should take any and all $ possible to reimburse your time and effort over the years. Thanks for all you do!

Thanks for the feedback. OK, I think a good plan for donations will be to continue to accept them, but make it clear that, at this point, they are not needed to keep the site going. The google ads have been deleted - I just don't like them. I still need to remove the Yard Sale donation request.

I also still need to figure out how to handle the affiliate threads in Shop for Gear board. So far none of the sponsors seem to have done anything to create their own threads there, so I have some time to decide. If there are people who like and use some of the affiliate threads for ski/outdoor gear (REI, backcountry.com, STP) it would help to hear from you about this...

You may have noticed that the Sponsor logos are now running on this forum. The official start date is Oct. 1 but I want to make sure that everything works properly prior to that date, so the sponsors get two bonus days! My plan is to not have any more space devoted to sponsors (or any kind of in-your-face advertising) than what you see now.

Looks good to me Charles, you are doing a good job keeping this site moving in a worthy direction.

cw