Another petsite I frequent (PCE) changed the way their ads were handled a short while back. Instead of using an ad network that provides 3rd-party adverts - some of which can be malicious or inappropriate - users of the site pay a small fee to upload their own custom adverts for a specific time period.

This earns more than the pennies from page views on the 3rd-party ads, provides a safe browsing experience free from the threat of pop-up ads/malware/etc, helps the users who put up ads to get eyes on their stuff, and generally provides amusement instead of frustration. There are a fair few people who buy ads just to show off their pets! I think it's a fantastic model that more websites should get on board with, and I'd love to see Lorwolf be one of them.

The only cons I could see from this would be needing the time put together a set of rules for ads, and needing someone to moderate the ads to make sure no one tries to slip anything untoward in.

You could potentially pop in 1 free ad a month as an incentive to the membership as well.

Thoughts?

Would love this! It just sounds so cute and positive-community-building.

It is working well on PCE but I am worried how it would work on a larger site in the long run.

Everyone will want their ads to be seen, but if 1000 people pay for ads then the actual time any of them show are going to be very low per user.

A suggestion to help with this problem I saw on PCE was make a page of just ads that shows like 20. That way people know their ad will show up somewhere on the site eventually if someone refreshes enough. People will want to see their own ads in action, and this would allow them to do so. Instead of averaging seeing their ad once every thousand refreshes the chance would be much more reasonable.

I agree that I really like what PCE does with their player-made ads, but I think those types of ads sadly only work with smaller communities as fun and cute as they are.

An alternative to this would be what Subeta does, where players can make banners to advertise their art shop (or whatever) but they only appears as an "ad" when you're browsing the forums.

I like this tactic because they don't completely replace third party ads, which means they're easier to whitelist for players that block ads on sites by default, and it gives the site the ability to place likely more profitable third party ads elsewhere.

i spoke about this a few weeks ago in another thread and it has my full support! itll probably need some size limits for the ad as to not make it intrusive or too small also !

another con though is that it might make the ad-free part of the moonstone subscription useless (regular ads are Unpleasant, but user-made ads that are filtered probably wouldn't be), but i'm not someone with a subscription so i cant say much on if that matters to people or not

I’m not sure it would as well here as it does on pixel cat’s end for one simple reason: lorwolf already has a premium currency you can spend money on and PCE doesn’t. I bought an ad on PCE because I wanted to support the site. If I wanted to support lorwolf with money I’d use that money to buy moonstones which have a lot of in game utility instead if running an ad of my cat. I suspect that’s part of why PCE has so many pet. banners. You can support the site with a bonus to show everyone your cat.

@Friend

I do understand your point about a larger site meaning individual people will be less likely to see their own ads. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that their ad will be seen by less people. I don't play PCE so idk their actual site activity, however we could still demonstrate this idea with rough numbers.

So say, for instance, that a small site like PCE has 300 active users on average and 30 of those users pay for ads. The visibility of those 30 ads (the number of times other players see them) will be the same as a site with 3000 active users that has 300 user-made ads. While it's less likely for the individual player to see their ad amongst the 300, the ad is still getting the same amount of visibility overall. And you can generally assume that the active player to user-made ad ratio will stay consistent no matter the size of the site.

I do agree that there's an element of user excitement for seeing their own ad that would be beneficial, however I don't think it's necessarily enough of a reason not to implement it. Perhaps a good way to clear up that sort of perception would be to make the analytics of an ad very clear. Such as the creation process of the ad including some information around the number of ads currently circulating, the number of active users on average at the time, and an estimate of the number of times the users potential new ad would be seen by other users.

I am confused as to what people would be advertising? I don't have a company or anything I'd like to advertise here. If people have art shops, they already have the forums to advertise those (and considering the general underpayment of artists, I doubt many would want to pay for the ad). Plus I second Markie's remark, that there are already ways to support the site, by buying moonstones.In which case buying an ad for kicks and giggles would just be a waste of money because you get nothing in return for it.

TLDR no support. I'd rather they focus on getting a good ad partner

Part of why the PCE ad system works is because of the community. PCE's community is incredibly different from Lorwolf's and the daily activity is ~<100 players on at once except for during updates and events.

A good example of this is how everyone interprets ads. On PCE, most of the ads are pictures of the advertiser's cats. There's some real-world shops by artists (I've actually wanted to purchase from a few of them, never would have found them otherwise!) and some ads about commissions. Some people submit jokes and memes. One person submitted an ad for an ARPG and there was another one for Mweor too.

Ads on PCE can't be for sales unless it's an art shop because they run for 30 days (or more if you pay extra), and if the sale wraps up beforehand, then the ad is moot.

This is all for clarity.

I don't mind either way what Lorwolf decides to do, but it'd need to be way later down the line. This is not something that could be implemented right now. I also use an adblocker on the site so it wouldn't affect me, but seeing how bogged down the CA queue is and how many other working parts are in motion, adding this to the administration plate wouldn't work out well.

Furaffinity is a larger art site that actually runs on that same system as well and people still see their ads fairly frequently so I'd say that's pretty viable!

Plus a petsite is a valuable ad spot for people in the art community which put up significantly more pleasant ads than either soulless, sketchy, or inappropriate ads from a poorly filtered ad network

+like... major ad network payouts are notoriously bad, so potentially even a very small percentage of users putting up ads would provide much more revenue

also i personally would be interested in putting up ads for my comic on here since it did well on PCE [and clearly FR works out great for hiveworks considering they seem to maintain an exclusive deal]

Massive support! If the ads were user provided, I would happily disable my ad blocker on here! I would also use this service myself, be it either for shop ads or just sharing some wholesome imagery/silliness. (^___^)

@/Gaia "In which case buying an ad for kicks and giggles would just be a waste of money because you get nothing in return for it."

Kicks and giggles is exactly what you'd get in return, which is enough for some folks, like myself. Not everyone will do it for real or in-game monetary gain.

@/Ninetails "I don't mind either way what Lorwolf decides to do, but it'd need to be way later down the line. This is not something that could be implemented right now. I also use an adblocker on the site so it wouldn't affect me, but seeing how bogged down the CA queue is and how many other working parts are in motion, adding this to the administration plate wouldn't work out well."

I fully agree that, while I would love to see this implemented, there are many other things that need tending to, before this is considered.