I want to add my thanks to the SD for making me get off my digital ass and install adblock too.
Well, I was promised crumpets with my tea, and now it turns out that they’re not really crumpets after all; they’re English Muffins.
The BASTARDS! :dubious:
I can’t take those ads anymore, I just can’t.
FIE! A POX on those administrators of the SMDB who created this plague of marketing stupidity!!
:mad: 
Make them stop! Please, make them stop!
( I hate the ads. For the record. )
People callled Google ads, they go in the house?
But you know that won’t last long. They’ll have to become more and more intrusive to improve results.
Here’s a question about the $100k lost. Is that the total amount it has cost the Reader over those years? Or is that the financial loss over those years after factoring in the proceeds of books, mugs, etc? In which case the cost of the boards would be even higher?
Also, it’s only been a couple of years since going P2P. So for years the SDMB was a free site with no ads that sustained itself somehow. But the past two years, with members paying, they’re still losing money? Two things jump right out to me.
1.) Is the cost of bandwith actually going up? How about the cost of servers? What fucking company is raping the Reader in these charges?!? From everything I’ve seen in IT, these costs have been steadily dropping for years now. Just like satellite, cable, internet access, phone service, PC’s and DVD burners, the longer a technology is there and the more consumers use it, the price goes down. Or is the Reader doing business in Bizarro world? Somebody please explain this.
2.) OK. It costs them money, no matter the amount, to run the boards and they’re tired of footing the bill since most of us don’t read the Reader. Therefore they’re losing money in ad fees. OK, so let’s go P2P. Some bitched about it, but most of us preferred to stay ad free so we agreed to pony up and keep the damn thing afloat. Here’s my question. What goat-feltching shithead in the accounting department did they find that was able to keep from shitting himself long enough to come up with the needed income on an annual basis? Looks like he was a little off.
Fuck’s sake, anyone here, EVEN I, could have looked at the estimated cost, divided that by the estimated number of members that would pay, and come pretty damn close to keep the boards from being the “low hanging fruit”.
No, friends. TPTB know damn well we’re pretty damn fervent in keeping this thing going and will put with a lot of shit. What I hate is the complete fucking disingenuousness in telling us it’s a sinking ship, even with the fees. They came up with the financial blueprint and apparently it was so far off they’ll piss off many, many Dopers. It’s got to be either a lie or stupidity. And I wouldn’t exactly say they’re idiots.
Perhaps the best thing is NEVER click on a Google Ad - ever.
I wonder what Google would think about a Message Board that gets tens of thousands of postings and gets NO clicks on their sleaze merchant ads.
I imagine there must be a point in which Google would find it more trouble than it is worth. (Granted, Google probably incurs very little cost for this - but it has to cost them something).
I was over in a weight loss thread in IMHO, and I couldn’t help but enjoy the irony of seeing “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973” at the top of my screen and “Lose 9 lbs. every 11 Days” at the bottom.
Snork! I may have to turn the ads back on just for the entertainment value.
Almost hate to mention it, but I’m starting to see links in the ads that, if posted as a comment in a thread, would easily run afoul of the SDMB’s policies regarding file-sharing and copyrighted material… I’m looking in the general direction of CS…
drewbert
The funny thing is that somebody might talk about the illegality of file sharing, hacking, etc and yet that might prompt the Google hamsters to display ads for just such things.
Thank you very much.
I hope to see you around here, though. Who knew the comic value of the ads? The irony of some of them is astounding! I am sitting back and enjoying the unintentional commentary (since No Flash didn’t work for me and is giving me MORE pop ups than I ever had…)
Gotta find out how to uninstall No Flash…
If it helps any, apparently Exploder 5.5 doesn’t know shit from shinola about Google ads (yet another of the myriad reasons not to upgrade whenever Supreme Overlord Bill says one should) and I don’t see any of the ads–but I must say that the parenthetical comments from everyone re the weirdly apropos links they’re seeing are making me laugh until I pee a little bit. On a board like this one an additional source of random bizarre irony is no bad thing–of course I might feel a bit differently if I were actually seeing the things. Or not… 
This thread is now calling ads for spyware blockers and spam filters. There’s some poetic justice to that.
Aww, that’s so nice of you to say! Thank you. I’ll be around until March or April, whenever my sub. runs out, but I don’t comment much. I tend to be quiet online for some reason.
Ummmm…I’d like to be really nice and say we see you over there in the corner and feel better just knowing you’re with us, but if you are “quiet” online, you may as well be dead…
Or we could embrace our telepathic skills–I’ve got some extra tin foil.
I know, it’s pathetic really. I enjoy reading here, but usually by the time I get to the end of a thread, someone else has already said what I wanted to say and it just seems silly to say it again so I wind up just closing the thread rather than responding to it.