Ads?

[modelperry]

Why am I now seeing ads in the middle of thread posts?

They are labeled as Google Adsense.

Greg

[Jason]

Hi Greg,

You are correct, those are Ads by Google you are seeing in between every couple of posts in the threads. While we had always had ads, we used to disable them once people had logged into the site. Probably why you do not remember seeing them before.

Jason

[KCStephens]

I am also seeing these ads. Do you plan to disable them again

[airdave]

AdBlockPlus takes care of them for me. lol just sayin'

[Vermin_King]

I just see where a tiny line says 'Google Adsense'. My guess is that AdBlock Plus is doing its job


Ah, the simultaneous posting ...


Jinx ... buy me a Coke

[sgoti]

Originally Posted by airdave

AdBlockPlus takes care of them for me. lol just sayin'

Maybe AdBlock is why nobody was reading your billboards- they couldn't see 'em!

[Jason]

The ads are probably here to stay unless I came come up with a way to generate money to cover the yearly cost of the community. Might look at setting up a Patreon account for members that want to support the community but the only benefit I can think to include would be having no ads, so I am not sure if people would be willing to contribute.

When we started the community back in 2007, I was running the Hobby Factory and just hosted the community on the same hardware as the store so the only cost was the cost of the software and my time. I had previously tried to buy the Card Models community back in 205 or 2006, but Ron sold it to Peter T Davis instead who merged it with a bunch of other sites and sold it to CrowdGather. Eventually, CrowdGatherwent broke as they could not generate enough revenue from the sites that they put up the sites for sale. When all was said and done, they were able to sell the sites that made money, but the combined site was not included in the sale with their other sites. It eventually was sold off when they files for bankruptcy or by the company that did the backends for back payment, I do not know which.

When I shut down the Hobby Factory back in 2015, it was due to the lack of time and not wanting the quality of service to slip, there was still money in the account from sales, but that money quickly drained away as costs kept coming in for the server, domain fees, etc. When I was doing Webhosting for clients, and running the Hobby Factory, it was not an issue as there was enough money coming in to cover the costs. It was also easy to justify that there was no cost as the server cost was covered by clients and such. Really it was money that I should have spent elsewhere or invested, but I did not give it a thought as it all balanced out.

Since then it has become obvious that I have been covering the costs and operating at a loss for at least the last 10 to 15 years, but as my accountant says, that can not continue. Yeah, I have been including the loss against my taxes, but after having a loss for the last eight years, my accountant is against including it as it does not look like it will ever be viable.

But when I stopped the side hustles, the cracks started to show. The community has grown, and it is not like I can move it backed to shared hosting. I have tried to reduce costs where I can like stopping our nightly backups from being copied to the cloud, as our compressed backups are over 250 GB now and still growing. Paying a year in advance on hosting also saved 20%, but the strong US dollar is not helping. It is amazing how we have grown as a community over the last 17 years, but when you think about it things add up. It might not seem like much, but even the screenshot showing how Airdave's ad blocker works is a 515 KB file, which is now stored on the server and will be backed up and saved for prosperity.

I have been looking at upgrading and making some improvements, and that also has a cost as we need to renew the software to access the updates as well as the time required. I have thought of getting the Hobby Factory off the ground again, but it was a hobby itself as it was not profitable when my time was taken into consideration. At this point in my life, I have to start thinking about how to reduce costs so I can afford to maybe retire and enjoy building a model now and then.

I am just trying to cover the costs of running the community so that we can survive one more year. Block the ads if you want, but unless we can find a way to at least cover the ongoing costs, the community will not survive. Just my two cents.

Jason

[airdave]

Odd, that I just turned off AdBlock (to see what the ads are like)...

and then I had to turn off Shields - part of the Brave browser...

and then I cleared cache and temp files...

and still, the Ads are not showing.
Still got that Adsense bar, but can't see the ads.

Whats going on?
I have no other add-ons that would affect it.

...
yeah, I tend to store my own images and avoid attachments, but I've been getting lazy.
thats why I used the pm.com attachment option this time.
I should know better.

I am well aware of storage limitations and the cost of webhosting.
I've opened up my own forum to allowing attachments,
but only because the traffic on my site is so low and slow.
I monitor it, in case it ever picks up, and then I will have to limit attachments again.

Maybe we all have to get used to seeing the ads, if thats the only way to generate revenue from the site.
I'm not in a position to support two forums financially, but I will help in whatever other way I can.

[whulsey]

As long as the site is working right and EXISTS, I can put up with the ads.

[Laurence Finston]

I don't mind the ads and I understand the need to generate revenue. Personally, I'd be satisfied with a mailing list or a Usenet or Google Group, but many people probably wouldn't be.