About the Elftown ads

As seen on <URL:donate.html>, Elftown is run on hardware bought from donations from its users, so why are there ads?

The thing is that Elftown's server ([Elftron]) is quite hungry for both electricity and bandwidth. And since it became too much trouble to have it at Linköping University with power-failures, restrictions on what to do with the server and that it's located far from where anyone can fix the hardware problems (and locked in during weekends for anyone who cares), someone else than the university has to pay for it.

So because the donations are meant for buying new hardware, it feels wrong to use them keeping Elftown running.

So therefore there are ads at the following places:

1) When you log out from Elftown on top of your house. If Google does its job well, the ads should be accourding to what you've written in your presentation, but so far Google seems to do a bad job at it.

2) To the right of wiki-pages unless you're logged in. Logged in Elftowners who help producing the wiki-pages don't get any ads.

3) At the bottom of the different news-pages (<URI:news.html>, <URI:poems.html>, <URI:featured_member.html>, <URI:featured_wiki-pages.html> and <URI:drawings.html>). At least at the drawing and poem pages, the ads seem to be close to the subject so someone might actually enjoy the ads.

I thought of having ads on the entrance page, but as that page is an advertisement for Elftown, it seems like a bad idea. It's better with a new Elftowner than a click on an ad.

About clicking on the ads
For the Google ads, Elftown gets income for every time someone clicks on them. What ads that are served depends on the content on the page their are shown on and what you click on. If you avoid clicking on your favourite shop's ads, then they have to pay much more for every click to be seen, and if you click a lot on some ad, that advertiser gets the clicks cheaper.

The Project Wonderful and the other ads on the bottom of pages are not paid per click at all, but per impression.

The links in the Elftown Mall (<URL:mall.html>) don't give Elftown a shit unless you buy something following those links.

What do you think?
About the Google Ads (logout and news-pages):
About the Project Wonderful ads (Right bottom and Mainstreet):
The MyStarship.com ads (bottom):
The big ugly ad at the bottom (Might not always be seen):
The Elftown Mall (<URL:mall.html>):


Update 2009-01-17

I'm trying out some new ads now. The Elftown Mall (<URL:mall.html>) hasn't sold one single item yet and both [Hedda], Lilo and [Elftron] need food and shelter.

There is some word-ads from Kontera that appear on exported wiki-pages. They give very little money per click, but I personally don't think they are in the way, but I've heard other opinions, but not from Elftowners.

There is a huge totally annoying ad that pops up when you move to the top-links (after 3 seconds after the pages is loaded) now. I'm not sure if it will be irritating and I'll test it out myself now. (Update That is removed now)

Another ad...

Now there is a link at the bottom of the pages from http://mystarship.com/
These ads basically gives Elftown's ad (Right now looking like http://www.elftown.com/elftown_468x60.gif) the exposure on other sites. The more that is is viewed and clicked on, the more Elftown's ad is shown on other sites. I'll try it for a while at least. All these ads should point to science fiction sites, so they should at least be remotely interesting.

As for the Chitica and Kontera ads, I think I'll be removing them. There are some other ads that needs removal too, because they don't give anything.


Even more ad test... (2009-01-19)

Sorry about this, but I have to try out some ads. There is a big one at the bottom of pages now. I think I'll switch between that and the Project Wonderful ads (and remove the MyStarship ad), but not have both at the same time. Update: ADSDAQ said that Elftown is a filthy piece of shit and that they want nothing to do with it. Maybe because they fucking morons that don't like the language we use here. So no ads from there, which I guess is just as well as their ads tend to be annoying. Eh... Wait, it says: "Domain is primarily a social networking application" as one of the possible reasons. I bloody selected that as a type of site and then it isn't OK. Grrr! Wasting my time.

More stuff (2009-01-20)

There are also AdEngage ads at the bottom now. It isn't more ads, but it's replacing the left Wonderful Project and MyStarship ads a little. So now you get three kind of ads on that place. Should make it more interesting than seeing the same ad/kind of ads all the time.

I got a really good deal here, and I really hope you like it and want to take a few minutes to try it out at least:
(Seems like no one likes it. I honestly can say I blame you. There are no shortage of free really good games to play (See some other ads here.).)

Message ads

(2008-02-19) There are now an ad in your messages. Seems like the Elftowners spend a huge part of their time (about 4%) on checking if people can read their messages yet. So I though they can just as well spend some time on watching some ads if they are that bored... The ads should be somewhat targeted at your interest if you have the right ones selected. (poetry, hunting, cats, physics, board games, beer, whisky, LARP, dogs, fashion, stocks, operas, wines, fishing, knitting, Mac and Linux are the ones used now and everyone gets ads about fantasy and scifi, of course).




Feel free to leave a comment about this.