Interstitial ads no longer visible for registered users

Rotary: Yup, you do get pop-unders still from our site, we haven't removed them (yet..? They do produce about significant portion of our income..).

So, lets summarize how things should be now:

-For www.afterdawn.com domain you will get one pop-under, which is session and time capped, i.e. you wont receive another pop-under for that domain until 24 hours have passed. This applies to all users, whether logged in or not. Note, the main front page of the site wont spawn any pops, ever.

-For forums.afterdawn.com, same system as for www.afterdawn.com. Again, same for logged in and non-logged users.

-For www.afterdawn.com, we use interstitials (the "in between" full page ads you'll see for 10 seconds until you get redirected to the correct place) for software item's homepage links (like the one you mentioned) and in some instances, to the "Best links" links visible in the sidebar. This applies to all users, whether logged or not. And these are, again, capped to max one per 24h period, so getting two within 24h period within www.afterdawn.com domain should be impossible.

-For forums.afterdawn.com, we use above-mentioned interstitials for links posted in messages that direct to outside *.afterdawn.com -domain scope. Again, maximum is one per 24h period. And this should be done currently in a way that only people who haven't logged in, get these.

-Additionally, we obviously use 728x90 leaderboards ("big banners") across our site (apart from www.afterdawn.com's homepage and forums.afterdawn.com homepage), 120x600 "skyscrapers" in selected pages on www.afterdawn.com (but not on forums.afterdawn.com) and 300x250 "box ads" in long threads, just before the last message on each page. Finally, our news at www.afterdawn.com carry "contextual" ads, where some of the words get "double-underlined" automatically and allow linking to sponsors for each keyword.

Phew, that's a lot of ad types Despite that, I personally think that we've managed to make the ads as non-annoying as possible, tiptoeing the thin line between user experience and ad dollars. But yes, we have thought about reducing the number of ad types eventually -- this all depends on variety of things. Lets say the "non-intrusive" ad types (leaderboards, box ads and skyscrapers) generate "enough", we will most likely begin a slow process of reducing ad types. The removal of interstitials from forums for logged users was the first step -- I'd imagine removal of popunders in forums for logged users will be the next.

 

You got that one right. I'm personally slightly ashamed of the crap our ad networks sell to the popunder and interstitial inventory at times. IMO, ads actually do boost the site's usefulness if they are highly targeted and provide information for the user that he/she has use for. Thus, the Goooooogle ads we run on our banner space tend to never cause any complains, as people find them useful rather than annoying. But yes, those stupid "you're winner" ads do drop the overall quality of the site and as the very first step I've been planning is to contact our ad networks and ask them to remove crap like that from our inventory, even if it would harm our bottom line.

 

arcanix: Alright. So, basically your idea is that AfterDawn should provide content for you for free, as we do now, but we shouldn't get any ad dollars either to pay the servers, but instead pay the hosting fees for 8 dedicated servers from our own pocket?