Sitepoint adverts

Now I am getting both the new ad banner and the annoying slide in ads.

I just noticed that if the slide outs aren’t explicitly closed, they persist across pages.

My interpretation of course, but it seems to me that a
“saw them and didn’t act on them and then went to a new page”
is an implied “close”

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I have been away for a couple of days and just reading the interesting replies.

Today I am getting a Google add below the header on the forum index page and I seem unable to close it.

This is replaced with another add below the header when I move to a section and the fly in ad when I go down the page.

Yes, that is an additional “banner” ad, which AFAICT is “permanent” (i.e. not a slide out) and can not be closed.

Even the ads that can be closed don’t stay closed.

Hey everyone,

Thanks for the discussion here. I know the ads are a big change, since we haven’t really had display advertising on SitePoint Forums for over a year.

As you all probably know, SitePoint is an ad-supported media company. We have a few other ways of monetising (including Learnable and our book sales), but the primary way in which we pay for hosting, content (we pay for every article published on SP) and staff is via ad partnerships. Simply put: no ads = no SitePoint.

As with every new project, we work on the Lean model: we build something, measure its effect, learn from that, and improve from there.

Our first mobile ads on the forums left about one line of visible content. That obviously didn’t work, so we revised that and improved. We’re continuing to do the same with forum ads. Suggestions are welcome, of course :smile:

A note on ad blockers: they really do hurt publishers, in very real and measurable ways. It’s a personal choice, but consuming free content while blocking advertising harms publishers.

3 Likes

I agree - particularly since I also depend on advertising income to pay for much of the web content I produce.

The only time I would consider implementing an ad blocker is on sites where the advertising becomes particularly annoying - as the constant popup ads at SitePoint have recently become close to doing. They wouldn’t be so bad if we could close them and have them stay closed for a few days across all the devices we use (which shouldn’t be too hard to track given that we have to login to post). Having them constantly pop up until we click close for each and every device we use to visit the site every day is a bit much - by the time it has popped up on fifty or so pages all on the same day it ought to be obvious that we are not going to click on that ad today and that continuing to pop up on further pages is rather pointless.

2 Likes

May I suggest whoever places the adds to be given a mobile to surf the forum for more than a brief five minutes.

The reason for this request is because the bottom right hand popin add, which hides the thread navigation buttons is impossible to close on both IOS and Android devices.

Please believe me that I have tried closing the popin bottom add and it always opens a new tab. The response click must be remarkably high for this poorly placed add mostly due to my failed closing attempts :frowning:

Is it possible to move the add to the left hand side?

I use one because so many sites employ adverts with moving content, or which pop-up/slide in unexpectedly. I have perceptual problems which make this kind of content really hard to deal with, so I end up disabling it. (Same reason I have to keep JS disabled.) I did try turning the ad blocker off on the forums, but as I mentioned above, there is no way for a keyboard user to dismiss the ads. (Or if there is, I had failed to find it before I gave up in frustration.)

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