explain xkcd talk:Advertise Here

Whitelisting

I did this WHITE HAT listing, and I just see this picture at the left side: Your Ad... But do I know if "www.projectwonderful.com" is just Black HAT? I do whitelist this page (expainxkcd), not more. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:17, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Whitelisting isn't short form for anything, it just means that you allow certain sites to pass through your adblocker. That image that you're seeing means that we don't have any advertisers running ads in your region currently, and clicking it will just tell you how you can advertise with us. If you can see that image, you're doing it right. EU tends to be less popular than our global traffic, despite EU being second in ad impressions only to our US traffic. An awful lot of our advertisers don't seem to be savvy enough to target EU manually, but if you have a business that you represent that you would like to promote through us, click on the bit of text that says "Your ad here, right now: $3.90" and try making an account and bid yourself on our EU/US space. Davidy²²[talk] 22:50, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Miscellaneous observations

Looking at the ad stats, the ads with the highest click rates (value for money) are grayscale. Moving ads tend to have similar click rates to ordinary, colored ads, and our ad provider seems to have had a recent shoot in popularity with kickstarter projects. Just a few curiosities that I've noticed recently. Davidy²²[talk] 08:26, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Full Disclosure on Lunarpages Ads

We should probably explain the Lunarpages ad, because an awful lot of our users really hate ads. Lunarpages is our new host, and they offered to give us dedicated scalable server space with unlimited bandwidth for free in return for a .jpg banner ad on our sidebar. That's a pretty big deal, because it shaves off about $700 of yearly fees, plus potentially unlimited overage charges with their standard bandwidth limit. If comic number 1190 had happened and we were on that bandwidth cap, we would have had to fork out up to $600 per month, which would make this wiki very costly to maintain indeed. By going with this ad deal, we can eliminate all unpredictable costs, allowing us to use our Project Wonderful ad money to pay for webpage caching/CDN services and buy ad space on other websites to spread the joy. With no ads, all of the above would put a ~$2000-3000 dent in our pockets per year. With ads earning at their current rate, we can very comfortably pursue things like our current dedicated hosting or cloudflare to make the site faster without actually having to pay out our own money or beg users for donations. Our ads are small in terms of file size, and they only take up space in the sidebar that Mediawiki would have otherwise left blank. That's not much to pay for substantially faster server hardware and essentially free advertising. Davidy²²[talk] 16:50, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Updated this a bit. --Jeff (talk) 02:09, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Donations

Can we make donations instead of looking at ads? If so, add a link in the adblock message. 108.162.219.74 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

We can probably put that in our adblock message, I'll get the donation link. Donations in the past haven't been enough to pay for what we have now, but you can totally donate and keep adblock on if you want. If donations start performing well enough in the future, we might even be able to drop the ads entirely. That's pretty far off at the moment though. Davidy²²[talk] 20:43, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, how much do you make from ads, per viewer? I would guess that a typical donation would be larger? I don't see any donation links, though. 173.245.52.211 16:48, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

You can donate via in dollars via Paypal or via Bitcoin. We will make these more prevalent shortly. --Jeff (talk) 15:02, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

If you sell a product, you may also consider advertising with us. Clicking on the "Your ad here" message on the side of the page should take you to our advertiser page, and you can use the money you were gonna donate to get some publicity for your stuff at the same time. Davidy²²[talk] 07:22, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Animated ads

Hello, I just wanted to say that the current ad banner displayed in Europe would be somewhat annoying enough for me to reactivate my ad blocker. Now I gave it a bit of extra tolerance because of its hyper-relevant topic (and in a way I was happy to be informed of the Bobcatinabox project), but I think this banner is getting too animated and distracts too much when reading the website's content. The first form this ad took was that static image, which I prefer a lot and by the way got my interest enough to click on.

I find the message displayed when using an ad blocker ("It seems you are using noscript,...") sincerely convincing, especially the part saying "our ads are restricted to unobtrusive images and slow animated GIFs." It made me immediately disable mine when that message appeared some time ago, and since then I've been okay with static or quietly animated banners; but basically my point is that animated ads like this one could drive users, frustrated from the distracting effect, to activate their ad blocker.

So maybe the ad banners moderation should require less animation? I'm of course interested in any other view on the matter.

Cos (talk) 12:59, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we can't specify a maximum speed for ads; the checkbox only lets us allow or disallow animated GIFs. We accept ads on a per-advertiser basis, so when we accept an advertiser, they're clear to change and put up new ads whenever they want, so they can vary the images they show without us having to say yes every time a change is made. That particular guy had actually been rejected before and told to slow down the animation, which he did initially. I'll talk to the advertiser about it. Davidy²²[talk] 17:24, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, thanks for this reply (and sorry for the delay of mine), that explains and addresses pretty much everything about that issue. - Cos (talk) 14:27, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

I've disabled adblock for the site but this projectwonderful banner is extremely annoying, so I have no recourse but to enable it back. Things jumping around on the periphery of your viewing field are extremely annoying. I already hate the advertiser company, but I don't want to hate explainxkcd too - I actually like the site. That's why I am disabling the ads. 108.162.215.10 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Huh. Which site was it, in particular? We can get that dealt with in short order. Davidy²²[talk] 03:48, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Again, this ad features WAY to much obnoxious animation. Enough to make me re-enable adblock. I usually enjoy the explain xkcd ads, but this ad fits my description for the most obnoxious kind of ad there can be: a weird, inexplicable animated gif. Suspender guy (talk) 14:57, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Spelling/Grammar

It says "ads than masquerade as operating system dialog boxes", using "than" instead of "that" (Can be fixed quick) —Artyer (talk) 17:44, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Done. Davidy²²[talk] 17:46, 8 September 2014 (UTC)