Not sure when this was implemented, but I reformatted one of my machines and revisited the forums here and started reading some threads as an 'unregistered' user (ONLY IN YOUR DREAMS AC) and I noticed that users are given a 728x90 banner just below the original post. I think this is a great idea. Maybe someone else knows when it started (DP would for sure).
[off-topic mode] SGH, I love that 3d effect on your site. I always wanted to do that too one day with 3d cube like table cells but never got round to doing it (crap at designing anyway). But this is probably the smoothest one I've seen around. Well done. [/off-topic mode]
Great idea, isn't it? Rewarding members and getting a buck or two from the people that don't register.
The idea has been used for awhile. I've used it on my site and I got the tip from someone else. I can't display the large banner on my forums because I don't use the wide layout, so I use the larger block of adsense ads. I also have a disclaimer stating that the ads are provided by google and that if you would like to remove them, simply register on the site and post.
Thanks! ... umm don't tell anyone, but it's actually a template we bought, then modified to our demanding needs. But that 3D effect is why we like it too.
It hasn't been very long, I started it as an experiment over the weekend. Mostly was just curious about the difference in CTR between the two formats more than anything else.
I imagine that the click through is pretty good. I almost click on them and I would be more likely than the ads in the upper right. Have you noticed any difference?
At this point they are not, only because it's a quite a bit more difficult to make the revenue sharing system work within a group of posts. The long winded reason is vBulletin is setup so the posts displayed on the page (when viewing a thread) is actually built before any of the rest of the PHP processing is done. Finally figured that out when I realized I couldn't use any of the normal PHP variables within the post section. So basically the posts part of the content is built before anything else is run (including the phpinclude_start stuff which is where the revenue sharing stuff resides). It's built and stuck into a variable called $postbits which is then used by the template system. One thing I'm not going to do is modify the PHP source code to implement it, because then it's something that has to be redone every time you upgrade vBulletin. The existing setup was a quick 2 minute hack to test it and I may come up with something that would let it work without modifying the source (like putting a static string into the $postbit variable, then replace that with what I want after the fact when I'm able to actually do some PHP processing). But right now it does not.