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Going to try google adsense on the pages for 1 week

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mouser:
ps my general feeling is to not have any ads on the site unless the money lost from not having them is truly dramatic.  when we took them off the site we lost $5-$8 per day of revenue.  that is not chicken feed for this site, that's a significant amount.  but removing the ads was a very nice feeling and i think the pride and dignity of not having ads (and not feeling like we were suckers putting stuff on our site that we don't necesarily approve of), was worth that loss.  but we try to be practical here, and if we go to the point for example that the ad money was bringing in, for example $100 a day, then it might mean we should focus less on donations and more on giving software away and less on asking for donations.  though i have to say that i think being funded by donations has made a serious difference in the way this site operates, and shifting to an ad funded model would cause real harm to that, so i'm not expecting to go down that road.  but i just think we should stick to our willingness to not be afraid to experiment, explore different possibilities, etc.  at least it keeps life interesting.

cranioscopical:
I take your point about being unable to replace $100/day.

At $8 is it unfeasible to get 365 people each to donate $8 extra, annually?

mouser:
i think that was my point chris - i think we'd rather lose $10-$15 a day and have the pride and respect that comes with not having adverts.

i was just saying that if we ever get to the point where some tasefully small subtle ads would bring in $100/day, well that's a lot of money that could fund a lot of stuff (for example it would mean less begging for people to donate to reviewers if they could get the advert money from the review pages, etc), and we'd have to think hard before giving up $100/day in ads that would be impossible to make up from donations.

nudone:
rather than taking google's adds, how about taking sponsors or adds from companies that sell products that DC does approve of - just on a trial run, of course.

i know it is almost anathema to think in such a way but an add is an add after all - is there anything special about using google's adds over a company we respect?

mouser:
the main advantages of google (or similar service) is simplicity.  no contracts, no hfinding advertisers, etc.  you end up with ads that usually have something to do with the content on the page automatically.  you'd expect to make more from a negotiated ad contract, but it would be a *lot* more work.

as chris brought up - maybe we should think about this whole ad thing some more because one of the things we don't want to happen is to give people the impression that our reviews and recommendations are biased in order to favor people that we might have ad contracts with.

that's what's so nice about having normal users fund our site - it means there is no split loyalty or appearance of favouritism or motivation to do anything but please the members of the site, and i quite like that.

but if we put our heads together we might be able to come up with something different and unusual that could work and still be respectable..

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