Quote:
Originally Posted by squiggs96
The owner has stated he is so tired of the whining about ads and he is frustrated that everyone isn't pleased with him. If I had a website, and many of my members were annoyed and disgruntled with how it operated, I'd be inclined to change the way it operated, since they are my audience, instead of telling them to stop whining. However, I do not have a website, so it's not a problem for me.
The ads on my phone are awful on this site. They are now about 3/4 of the screen. It's to the point where I don't read CP as much and maybe that is the intent.
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On one hand, it is not an inexpensive endeavour to run a site that gets this much traffic and consumes the bandwidth that it does. Sponsored forums only bring in so much revenue, with ads making up the rest -- which isn't likely much. Ad revenue isn't terribly lucative just through impressions (views), it's usually click-through and affilitate links (ie: adverts for an item to purchase on Amazon and the user clicks and follows through with buying it) that gets the better revenue. When it comes to pay per impression, the more aggressive and obnoxious the advertising you permit on the site, the more money the advertiser will pay you for the privilege to badger your less tech-savvy users who haven't figured out ad-blocking.
On the other hand, plenty of sites have adopted a model whereby you can become an ongoing sponsor and buy a membership -- usually something like $5 a month -- which gives you additional perks, like most or all of the ads being removed, special forum access, additional features like being able to set your own custom user title, animated GIFs in avatars, etc. Given that this site is run on a version of vBulletin so old that it can drink in the United States, the likelihood of this happening is probably a long-shot. Unless it is something that completely breaks the forum, I think the effort going into the forum is merely for the purposes of KTLO. That's not entirely a good or a bad thing on its own if the product fills all the needs it sets out to, but it's not great when there are aspects of the user experience suffering for it.
I would guess there's two things going on:
1. this site isn't a full-time job for the owner but a hobby that happens to generate revenue, so it's not a priority.
2. site ownership has made a judgement call that annoying and intrusive ads that border on site-breaking for native mobile browsers aren't bad enough to invest the time in fixing it (ie: use Tapatalk), nor is it enough of a detractor that keeping those problem ads in place risks decimating page views and unique visitors, so there's no pressing need to disable the problem ads and sacrifice the revenue they bring in.