Yes, that's an ad. Here's why we're running them.

Yes, that's an ad. Here's why we're running them.

bart's picture

Hey folks.

If you've been around OGA for while, you may remember that we ran ads briefly in the past.  The ads were through google adsense, and once I filtered out all of the skeezy ones, revenue dropped to about 60 cents per day.  I figured it wasn't worth $20/month to have an ugly ad up on the main page, so I took it down.

It's several years later and we're getting 10 times the hits now, and we have a big enough presence that I think it's worth trying again.  I know they're not pretty, but the nice thing about ads is that they do bring in revenue, which can go into commissiong art or putting bounties on code features to make OGA better.  I'm currently running some test ads to figure out what the impression and click-through rates will look like, at which point I'll set a price.  If it doesn't look like OGA will be able to make at least $300/month in ad revenue, I'll take them down again.

Anyway, I've talked with the community about this on IRC and people seem very supportive thus far.  I'd be interested to hear some thoughts from people here on the forums too.

[Edit:  If you're reading this because you're interested in buying ad space, email us at advertise@opengameart.org and we'll contact you as soon as space is available.]

[Edit again:  I'm currently running 5 test ads.  To minimize duplicates (and maximize per view ad performance) I'll need about 20 total.  If you're interested in running a test ad for free, contact me on IRC.  We'll probably be testing for 1 to 4 weeks.]

Here are some random thoughts and facts that I'm too lazy to make into paragraphs:

  • OGA will run ads independently without using a middleman like google adsense.
  • Since we're hosting them ourselves, that means I can review each ad before we run it.  There won't be any ads with animations, sounds, popups, keyloggers, or malware that slip in.  I also will never run an ad that's meant to fool people into thinking it's not an ad (no huge DOWNLOAD buttons).
  • No ads will be run on individual art pages.  While this would be legal under the licenses we use here, it strikes me as disrespectful to the artist.
  • I may integrate with (ugh, sorry) paypal to allow people to get supporter accounts (right now donations are completely separate from accounts) that would have an option to turn off ads.  Note that supporter accounts would not receive any additional access or features other than the ability to shut off ads, and a medal indicating supporter status.  I'd be interested in working out other payment options, but I don't really want to get into the business of processing credit cards myself, since that's a huge legal ball of wax that I don't want to deal with.
  • I'm probably going to sell ads by either hits or unique hits.  I don't want to get into clicks, because of issues with bots, and also because click through depends a lot on the ad itself, which I have no control over.
  • Right now there's no "advertise with us" page, because I don't know how much we'll be charging.  I can't set a good price without getting some feel for what kind of click through rates we're going to get.  I'll make a blog post once OGA actually starts selling ad space.

I'd be interested in hearing peoples' thoughts on all this.

Bart