Ads taking up 1/3rd of the screen!

[Noir Angel]

Hey guys I would love to hear your feedback on how we can improve the experience at Neowin but the fact is we offset the bigger ads to guests because there are always 1000's more of them on Neowin all the time. Max member count at any one time never reaches past 300.

So instead of bitching about the ads you don't see when you're logged in, how about some suggestions to turn those guests into members? I don't really understand why our member to guest ratio is so extreme myself?

Remember we pay developers, newsposters, our own hosting, two full time staff from that income, and our advertisers are pretty much requiring these types.. and lastly guests won't always see the big ad, as it should only display once or twice in a 24 hour timeframe. I never see them in Europe when I check the site logged out as well.

I appreciate meaningful feedback.

As a viewing user I can only offer this:

In general terms, when I visit a site I look for a few things:

> Original content

> Quality of design

> A good variety of discussion options

> Something that makes me want to register (otherwise I just lurk as a guest)

I think points 1, 3, and 4 are well covered and whilst in terms of skin design Neowin is up there with the best IPB forums on the Internet excessively large adverts are extremely offputting. Sometimes those on their own are enough to make me leave a site and never return. I also tend to find any audio / flash ads that take ages to load to put me off, the same goes for obnoxious flashing ads. They steal focus from the content I want to see and irritate me into going elsewhere for the information.

So in my book it's a matter of compromise. Trying to maintain the viability of a site whilst attracting visitors is hard I appreciate that but if the advertising is over the top it's simply going to drive members away.

As for registering: Simple math, for every visitor that registers another 50 will not, that's just the way the Internet works. But one thing I will say is that when I read a lot of Neowin's front page articles they feel especially hostile towards Google and people that use Google products like Android. The coverage on the front page is almost dominated by Microsoft whilst I'm not saying there is no coverage of other products it is in my opinion heavily biased towards Microsoft. And whilst I don't personally like Apple products it also strikes me as if there's a lot of open hostility towards people who use their products as well.

I don't think there is an easy fix for the registration numbers however, it's just one of those things. These forums retain a decent level of activity.

[Steven P. Administrators]

Just to answer the last two posts.. we tweaked the header for registering and added connect with facebook and twitter and already we are seeing (in two days) an average of 50 signups a day when that was in the high 30's low, 40's before it (since adding strict spam filtering hooks for IPB) and the Vibrant ads, do close after a few seconds of mousing away.

Additionally I have contacted Vibrant (text hover ads) to see if we can do a better job of our offerings (offset to guests possibly) and our primary ad provider, mostly to do with Google change about excessive ads in the header..

I won't lie, the ads in the header earn us the most money, and although we want to remove them, we won't be able to pay everyone if we did.. they are looking into ways we can offset it though I can assure you.

One more thing, as owner I'd like nothing more than an ad free site, or a site with very few ads, but the reality is that we pay a lot of people and services, without them we simply couldn't exist anymore.

I think we already do a good job of not forcing overlay ads, full page "in-between" ads to get to articles or other areas of the site, and we try not to screw the actual content as well by embedding ads within our own content.

I know overlay ads have appeared, but when they are reported I always get them removed, and they aren't put there because we wanted them! I'm in Europe so I never see those types of ads either, which makes it a bit more difficult to moderate.