Don't do it for your members. As simple as that. My forum pushes roughly 5k uniques and around 80k pageviews a day. About 100-120 new members, over 1500 new posts a day. Not small, by any means. My forum and main page deal with widgets. Since Adsense advertisers often push stores selling fake widgets or replicas, this left somewhat of an odd feeling in the guts of many of my members - especially since we advocate against fake widgets. After removing AS ads completely from the forum for logged members and replaced them with affiliate banners (with "Visit our sponsors to support widget forum" text below), I noticed the following effect: 1. Members are happier, as they aren't swamped with advertisers selling fake widgets and occasional untargetted ads (for bulletin board software, etc) 2. Income has increased tremendously. From previous $40-80 a day to $300+ through commissioned sales 3. The Adsense earnings from lurkers and SE traffic to the forum stayed the same Lessons learned - upsell your members to commissioned sales. As they develop banner blindness over time and activity on the forum, they rarely click anyway.
Very good indeed. I have a forum getting the same types of numbers you do and I cannot agree more with the idea of upselling registered users. I force my 'guests' to see an adsense ad randomly in a thread but members see a targetted traditional banner instead.
Hey guys, its a little off topic but when you have a forum that is pushing those numbers - 5,000 uniques, 80K page views a day - what kind of a server do you need and is it tough to find a good host at that level?
It does depend heavily on what other sites you run on the same box, what addons or additional scripts you run on the server, or whether it's a simple vBulletin install that does its work. Currently, I host on a Dual Xeon 3.0 Ghz with 4GB RAM and a dual 32GB SCSI raid1 from www.JupiterHosting.com . Previously, the forum was on a single P4 3.2 Ghz with 1GB RAM, and the server ran into its limits on busy occasions. I am sure you don't need to go as far as I did (I run several other things off that box, too) but it shouldn't be an entry level box if you want to keep things running smoothly at all times.
I had the same with this. I run a large forum (27500+ members. 1,200,000 something posts). I ran Google ads for some time and never covered costs. My costs were quite large as I had to have a dedicated server to keep the thing up to speed. Although I didnt use affiliate ads, I did ditch Google Ads for privately pimped text links, now im going from losing money to actually making money with that site. I wish I did it earlier. (hmm, that sounded infomercial-ish)
Firstly my forums aren't quite as big as yours - probably about a thrid of the size, pulling about 1500 uniques a day. Anyway I have the same problem with current adsense ads being somewhat against the style of the forum and I have had many complaints about them, but unfortunately there aren't any affiliates programs for me to really push in relation to my topic - so I'm left with not a lot of options - or at least what I feel is a lose - lose situation. In addition to this unlike many other webmasters that struggle to make ends meet when it comes to fourms, mine have generally been quite lucrative for whatever reason always covering the expense of the site itself and often many time mores. Do you think the continued running of the current google ads has long term detriments to the forum - or can I just keep playing it off as its Google who serve the ads and that we need them to keep the forums alive?
can't you run a server over your computer using windows xp and a server program? or what's the maximum limit for simultaneous connections for xp? my computer is i think 2.5 ghz and 768megs of ram using 348kbps upload speed and 4mbps download speed.
Does anyone know of some good information on getting new visitors to an Adsense forum? I am consodering starting one.
Here are some optimization tips for forums from the Inside AdSense blog: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/six-adsense-optimization-tips-for.html
Do you know how to tune servers rehash? I've had some people look at it and well...it still does server time outs I'm running at 3.6 ghz 1.5 gig server, might upgrade to 2 gigs soon
I just recently switched the majority of my adsense ads to 'guests only'. I'm interested to see the results. I was getting a decent amount of clicks before, but I was constantly changing the ad colors and placements to fight ad blindness. I'll post my results in a few weeks if there's something interesting to share.
Yeah Great point. For my main site: My members respond so well to amazon ads...They just hate absolutely hate adsense mainly because mine is a free info site and those adsense ads lead to websites charging for the free info I already provide...they have just started hating it.
I've only been doing the 'guests only' thing for two days now and I'm very pleased with the results so far. I'm getting just as many clicks, if not a bit more, and my CTR has definitely improved. I'm interested to see how this plays out in the long run. Plus I feel better that my registered members aren't faced with so many ads, though they never really complained about it in the past. I just like the cleaner look overall for my members.
In my suggestion bringin advertisement to forums is bothering mostly of the members , because some members like places without advertisement's...(anyone understand's what i ment ?)
I like this thread. can anyone tell me how to enable the feature to turn off adsense ads for registered members? or is there code? cheers. can this be done in any forums? such as SMF boards? I own a vBulletin forum and a SMF forum, both have no ads on though.