OVF update - adverts

[robf]

Hi all,

As I am sure you are all experiencing, OVF is seeing the costs of lots of things go up. Notably, hosting costs. These have risen steeply and the monthly fee is now about 25-30% higher than it was.

I do carry advertising to help me meet the costs of this site which can be considerable.

At the same time, the money coming in from Google Ads has gone down by as much as 90%. 

So, I have switched advert providers as of the weekend. 

Hopefully, there will be very little difference apart from the fact the new provider should bring in more revenue and enable me to meet the outgoings.

A few notes - 

1. There is a large advert at the top which appears once a day. It is usually displaying betting. This will go when the contract for it expires in about a week. On that note, while betting companies do like to advertise on sports sites like this, I appreciate it is not to everyone's taste. I do carry links to gambling help pages but perhaps more importantly, I will making conscious efforts to lower the amount of gambling content on here. It may not be totally possible - the ad provider I use will select what is displayed - but hopefully you will see a noticeable difference with less betting/gambling adverts appearing.

2. There may be a few teething problems over the coming days as I add the ads - so please bear with me and sorry for any inconvenience. I appreciate ads may not be to everyone's tastes and can be annoying but I would reiterate that this site is provided free of charge so I do need to bring in some revenue and I feel that a few ads (the amount on here is miniscule compared to some others) is a fair "price to pay" for the free service.

3. Finally, my main criteria when agreeing advert deals is that they don't interfere with the content. There is a "sticky" at the bottom of screens but rest assured there will be no ads which overlay over forum posts, pop-up and take over the whole screen and so on. I have agreed settings that all ad types on here do not "get in the way" of reading forum posts and blog posts. This does ultimately result in the site getting less revenue from adverts as the more obtrusive types pay more but I feel the inconvenience to you, the users, is more important than the money brought in to pay the bills. 

Thanks,

Rob

[Playa Amodores]

34 minutes ago, robf said:

Hi all,

As I am sure you are all experiencing, OVF is seeing the costs of lots of things go up. Notably, hosting costs. These have risen steeply and the monthly fee is now about 25-30% higher than it was.

I do carry advertising to help me meet the costs of this site which can be considerable.

At the same time, the money coming in from Google Ads has gone down by as much as 90%. 

So, I have switched advert providers as of the weekend. 

Hopefully, there will be very little difference apart from the fact the new provider should bring in more revenue and enable me to meet the outgoings.

A few notes - 

1. There is a large advert at the top which appears once a day. It is usually displaying betting. This will go when the contract for it expires in about a week. On that note, while betting companies do like to advertise on sports sites like this, I appreciate it is not to everyone's taste. I do carry links to gambling help pages but perhaps more importantly, I will making conscious efforts to lower the amount of gambling content on here. It may not be totally possible - the ad provider I use will select what is displayed - but hopefully you will see a noticeable difference with less betting/gambling adverts appearing.

2. There may be a few teething problems over the coming days as I add the ads - so please bear with me and sorry for any inconvenience. I appreciate ads may not be to everyone's tastes and can be annoying but I would reiterate that this site is provided free of charge so I do need to bring in some revenue and I feel that a few ads (the amount on here is miniscule compared to some others) is a fair "price to pay" for the free service.

3. Finally, my main criteria when agreeing advert deals is that they don't interfere with the content. There is a "sticky" at the bottom of screens but rest assured there will be no ads which overlay over forum posts, pop-up and take over the whole screen and so on. I have agreed settings that all ad types on here do not "get in the way" of reading forum posts and blog posts. This does ultimately result in the site getting less revenue from adverts as the more obtrusive types pay more but I feel the inconvenience to you, the users, is more important than the money brought in to pay the bills. 

Thanks,

Rob

Rob, you don’t have to apologise. This forum gives lots of ppl plenty of pleasure and is very popular. Thank you for being the custodian of the forum that is your creation. So well done. 👏👏👏. You should be given a squad number, as appreciation.

🎵 There’s only one Rob  Fielding🎵

[robf]

Thanks! It's a necessary "evil" but I always think it's good to be both straight-forward and honest when it comes to these things.

[mr.hobblesworth]

Not sure if it's just me getting this but since we started having adverts, I have a grey strip at the bottom of every page. 9 times out of 10 there aren't even any ads on it but you can't click on page numbers etc until you 'x' the grey strip. Obviously this is very much a trivial issue and I'll probably get used to it, but it's a bit irritating especialy as there aren't even any adverts being displayed.

[Santa]

On my phone when I get a new notification (reply, like, etc) it still pops up at the bottom of the page, only now it’s behind the advert. Can this be tweaked?