Genesis Forums

I've mentioned this before without much response...

But since there has never been as much interest for promotion as it is now I'll give it another shot.

Paying for ads is of course a good idea, but it needs... money. If we want sustained year-round ads I think we should seriously consider joining a banner-exchange system. We may not have much to offer, but especially our forum does have a fair amount of traffic. I dont know about the official homepage, but it probably gets some traffic as well. And It could get more if we for instance put Crossbearer maps and/or quest help on the official page.

The benefits of doing this is we could introduce ADs on our page, in exchange for our ADs on other pages. In short, there more hits on our pages, the more of our ADs are shown on other pages. Simple as that.

Banner exchange services these days are pretty good, you can usually specify where you want your ADs to be seen, and what types of ADs to show on your own page.

But, it would introduce ADs on our forum (most likely a top banner), and perhaps some on our official page as well.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Good idea or should we remain completely AD-free?

I would prefer keeping our main site ad-free. I see no problem with having ads on the Forum, however, and it is the one that gets the most traffic.

G.

does the forum format allow for the potential of advertising? I'm not familiar with the setup?

Forum is just a standard phpBB forum. We can definitely add ads to it if we want. Not sure if we do though.

If for some reason we could do a banner swap with Cmud -- you don't think thats something we should take advantage of? While I realize that scenario seems pretty unlikely .. my point is I think having the option if the right opportunity presents itself -- is nice to know .


*Edited for grammar

I'd be curious how many hits this forum gets per day. Any way we can get that info, Petros or Cotillion?

G.

Kitriana wrote:If for some reason we could do a banner swap with Cmud -- you don't think thats something we should take advantage of? While I realize that scenario seems pretty unlikely .. my point is I think having the option if the right opportunity presents itself -- is nice to know .


*Edited for grammar

The possible ways would be to either join a banner exchange program, where banners are exchanged automatically within a theme or target group. We cant control directly where our ADs are shown but it will mostly likely be on sites that's at least somewhat similar to ours.

OR, we could directly ask other sites to exchange banners. Like Cmud / Zuggsoft for instance, or other places with the right crowd. That way needs more work though.

Personally I dont like ADs in general either, and I like AD-free environments, but I dont think a top AD on the forum would be that annoying really, I mean people are so used to ADs these days it almost looks more professional with ADs than without... I think the possible gain outweights the negative parts.

Yes it would be interesting to know daily hits on the forum.

Here are the board statistics:

Number of posts: 15429
Posts per day: 17.07
Number of topics: 1528
Topics per day: 1.69
Number of users: 257
Users per day: 0.28
Number of attachments: 38
Attachments per day: 0.04

Note that these statistics include major lulls when no one really logs in and everything is averaged in. I can reset the statistics to get a more accurate count of more recent stats.

Petros: Is there a way to set it up so we cant count the actual "page hits"? Basically each time a forum page is loaded. Thats usually what's important in terms of advertising.

I've enabled Google Analytics for the forum also.