Ad Format Discussion

[johnnycage]

Google ads at the top? Oh my...

Sorry to say but that totally destroys the look and feel of my current shoutbox. I rather prefer the popunder though, although it is worst than this google ads.

I'm just wondering, how does the ShoutMix (www..com) owner, who happens to be 22 years old from my country, manages his service? As far as I could see, he don't put any ads surrounding his shoutboxes.

But one thing that I noticed is that his PAID feature occupies 60% of most of the SayBox's free features. That is how he manages his income as most of them would be having no choice but to subscribe to the paid service.

Here's my suggestion:

Redo all the features for "SayBox free" for new users henceforth, or if you want, you could even include some of those free SayBox users who registered last year until now, and force some of their 'expensive' features to be freezed, and most of them would have no choice but to rely on your exclusive paid service. By then, tons of people would start subscribing your paid service and soon after that, money would start flowing for you.

Although it sounds harsh to some, but I believe this would be the best way to balance user's needs.

Cheers!

[Renegade]

From what I've read before, ShoutMix has at different times been paid for from the owner's own pocket, and by sponsorship agreements with webhosts. I don't know if that's still accurate or not, and I doubt he plans on telling us, but I'm sure not going to pay for the costs of running a server myself. We did used to have a sponsorship deal with a webhost originally, and the popunders were added once that deal was over (you might remember that since I see from your forum profile you joined when we first added popunders).

The subscription package we currently offer seems to be bought mostly by people who don't like the popunders, and are willing to pay for an adfree service. The other features we include with it are pretty nice, but not many people used to buy extras from us until popunders were introduced on the service. So, I don't think people would want to pay for features we were previously giving away for free. I don't like the idea of putting all our best features in a paid only package anyway, but if you want to look at it as a way to "make" people subscribe, then popunders are a more effective way of doing that. We like the idea of being able to give as much away for free as possible, and as I noted in the first post, we're considering moving things in the other direction by including the anti-spam feature on free accounts.

[augied369]

The new ad format looks really good! A lot of people on the site I'm one of the the admins for has been complaining about the pop up's caused by the SayBox that we have on our site for a long time.

Are you still looking for saybox accounts for testing? The saybox our site has is The_Tails_Realm, Server 1

[Renegade]

Yeah we're still looking to switch a few more accounts over for testing for a while. We'll get yours done within a day or two.

[linkinlady]

My saybox hasn't loaded all day... www.linkinlady.net/ Is that something to do with what you guys are doing?

About the ads...I think they are pretty cool. I display ads on my blog so I get it and they don't bother me. I definitely like it better than pop ups.

[®i©hie]

Aug 15, 2008 20:18:05 GMT Renegade said:

If you'd like to volunteer your account for test purposes please post your username and server number - in return for being our guinea pig we will give you some free subscription time after testing is finished.

Username: soe
Server: 2

[madhatter]

Why does the shout display area still go blank with the barely legible text at the bottom right corner saying skip advertisement? If you can stop it doing that or provide an easier to see link then my members might start using it. As it is my members complain and it's obviously putting people of using the forum.
Those top ads are great, could never understand why you didn't use those before.

[Renegade]

That ad will be removed once we swtich over to the new ad method.

[Vhen]

Would text ads be any good for you guys? With them, people can customize the width and length of it better?