As you’ll notice, we have changed out homepage and will shortly be changing our achive pages to allow us to run ads (our first go-round is with TribalFusion. We’ll see how that does and then look at alternatives if we’re unhappy).
Joe has stuck to running Winds as a labor of love – which I’ve also believed in – for some time. But hosting is starting to get expensive as our traffic grows, and the increasing maturity of the blogosphere suggests that it’s time to go selling out – and That’s Motivation.
TribalFusion is a decent option.
You can also look into:
http://casalemedia.com/
http://www.mammamediasolutions.com/
They are two of the larger and more reputable advertising companies.
Don’t forget the obvious Goodle AdSense and Yahoo Ads is rapidly improving too.
There are many good ways to monetize your traffic to cover the costs of operation without “selling out”.
Good Luck!
ChatterBox
Good call. When you’re providing something valuable free, as Joe is, the best thing you can do for everybody is take pressure off yourself so the service is more likely to continue. Financial pressure is pressure. So ads are good.
Information wants to be paid for.
Better them than me.
Tribalfusion appears to have the same problem as several of the others, except Blogads — my Proxomitron (a resident universal web filter) makes them little red “[click here]” blocks.
I don’t know what Blogads does or doesn’t do to not raise the ire of my Proxomitron, but TF ought to learn from it.
It’s easy for me to block the adverts, but ya know what? I’m _not_ going to do that. Your site is of high enough calibre that I will at least give your advertisers the opportunity to attract my attention.
Sigh. I think it makes for a more crowded, less “clean” look. But, hosting dings us every month and we do need money for an upgrade of the site’s overall look – money I certainly don’t have with an relocation to California coming (moving stuff there from Toronto isn’t cheap!).
So, ads it is…..
Good call, A.L. and Joe, for the reasons already given.
Layout suggestion:
Why not place some slender ads in the blank upper right corner spaces of posts and stick to the old 2-column design? The three column isn’t bad, but the two column looked especially sharp and this way you could put more ads, provided your advertisers can accomodate smaller sized icons like that.
my $.02
I agree with AMac – it’s a good call, Joe. You’re running a first rate web site here, you deserve to make money from it. Ads are fine with me.
As free technical advice, I’d say stick to two columns. I’d also recommend ditching the tables and going to divs with overlow:hidden tags and keying from em instead of pixels. These and a few other technical tweaks can make a big difference in a blog. But that’s just technical, not graphic artist, advice.
When I made some of these changes, much to my surprise not only did I get better cross-browser compatability, my site also looks acceptable on the larger cell phone displays, which is really cool.
One thing I’m about to decide is that you guys provide way too much info for a three column layout. Larger articles page on and on and on and on. The right column may have to become a separate page, and the affliations and such placed below your advertisements.
All this stuff can be on the table when we do the site redesign. But first, the ads have to to their thing.
With respect to the money, Winds is very much a team effort, so I’m going to sidestep the issue of revenue for individuals entirely. At this point, the funds will all go toward blog expenses like hosting and technical support, plus a reserve fund that will let us pay for site redesign(s), technical upgrades, and other blog needs. there’s lots we can do to improve Winds, and the money will let us accomplish those things.
Beyond that, we’ll see. Marc and I have debated putting Winds into an LLC format, which offers some growth and structural advantages in exchange for the accompanying pains in the ass. But that costs money, too. One thing at a time.
Good luck on the ads, Joe. I don’t know about the others, but I would be interested in hearing your experiences/opinions regarding the different ad providers.
In my experience, adding the economic component to a “labor of love” is not always so easy. People can and do squabble over the silliest things when money is involved. Good luck to you guys.
Understand you are currently experimenting with ads and changing the layout, but need to adjust the format from cutting off words in the respective blogs. Seems to be a formatting error when the ad space was added.
Mark… good point. We’re trying to figure it out.