Me, I don’t give a shit if they make a few bucks. I’m just sick and tired of feeling like some chump looking for a free lunch. I, have paid every single penny that has ever been asked of me to support this board, same as all other subscribed members. We have outperformed their expectations in signing up and renewing, yet we are still in the red. It is not OUR fault.
They don’t offer any merchandise outside of one ugly tshirt and one ugly mug, which I already own. They don’t offer premium memberships, which I would buy. Instead they throw ads at their only paying customers and expect us to be happy about it.
It’s definitely not our fault. Nor is it their fault if they decide to raise revenue. We can always refuse to come back if they product they offer is no longer worth the price they charge.
Good comment. This is the only web board I pay for or have ever paid for. I personally don’t care about the adverts, but it would give me a warm and fuzzy if they at least acknowledged that I dug into my wallet when asked.
Regarding merchanising, I feel that the SMDB and the wailing list people are a natural fit. Surely there are some synergies to be monetized in a win-win fashion?
With regards to this ad hub-bub (and the now locked Pit thread), all I want to say is I have no problem with ads. Companies are certainly entitled to make money.
Companies however are not “entitled” to lie to the customers.
The gray area here seems to be whether it can be proved that they are lying in regards to the “need for more revenue”.
I have much more respect (and indeed prefer to do business) with a business that is forthright.
I just don’t see convincing evidence that they’re lying. I see people using a paltry set of facts to build castles in the air. I see the company saying, “Here’s our story, and we’re sticking to it, and we don’t much care whether you believe us.” I can deal with that.
People are trying to catch them in a lie by claiming they’ve said something that they’ve not said. That’s just foolish.
The only problem I have with the ads is that the majority of them seem to be for mailing services. I don’t like the idea of paying to subsidize a board which is subsidizing the telemarketing industry.
I wonder if Google treats mailing list folks with contempt, and requires them to pay per view of an ad instead of paying per clickthrough? If so, it might make sense for them to feed mailing list ads to a site until they’ve got a handle on what sort of ads might result in clickthroughs from that site.
jdavis has suggested over in ATMB that the spiders are going to crawl thread by thread, and are likelier to crawl a thread the more links to the thread exist. I’m not sure how well that will work here; if they don’t derive some sort of gestalt for the board, we may end up seeing the mailing list ads indefinitely.
I never even noticed ads until I started seeing all the “Pit The Google Ads” threads. They’re certainly not being shoved in my face or anything. All I see now are two links at the bottom of the page.
Easy to ignore, in fact, almost impossible to pay attention to without extra effort.
Are there some other obnoxious ads I’m not seeing?
Hm. On a serious note, “Lolitass” could be the intended spelling. One of them, “located NEAR YOU IN KANSAS CITY!!!”, is certainly doing some creative things to the other one’s ass…highly creative, almost inspired…
