Advertising on Gaming Blogs Like This One is Annoying

This isn’t a rant about how I hate all those intrusive, unskippable, annoying-as-hell ads on other gaming blogs. I suggest that if you don’t like those, do what I do and stop visiting the site. Also, we will probably get them when we sell out and have jets.

As you may have noticed, I’ve removed all the crappy adverts from this site. At the moment I think there are only three ads visible. One is at the bottom of every article and encourages you to buy games via GoG, which in turn helps us out. The other two are replacements of Google adverts for dating sites, hacked-ROMs and other garbage, now produced using Project Wonderful. Oh, and there are some links on the front page down on the left there. Other than that I’ve cut the rest out.

This is because adverts are god damn horrible things. Before I go on it might be worth mentioning that in this rant I’ll probably be honest. If you don’t want to hear about somebody trying to make a living doing something he should do for free, best avoid this post (and my weekly video blogs for that matter).

‘œBawww’ said the Wardrox who has to pay the server bills, ‘œif I don’t let whoever-the-fuck advertise their dating site for gamers how can I ever make money?’

‘œWell’ said the Wardrox who is fucking pissed off with his site looking like worthless tat, ‘œyou should have thought about that before you started all this shouldn’t you?’

Truth be told, through a summer of careful budgeting, doing some unrelated, paid work and general planning ahead, the servers are covered for the rest of the year. The site doesn’t desperately need any money from crappy adverts, and so they can just go away.

When there are these low-paying adverts on the site it makes everything just look tacky, and like we’re doing all this for the measly few dollars that float our way. I am doing this in the hope that one day it can earn me a living, but that goal isn’t reached like this.

I’m re-doing from near-scratch how NG handles its adverts. Previously I just stuck Google ads wherever I thought they could fit without being intrusive. Now I’m coding up a nice back-end so I can control what goes where. It’s why the most prominent (and only remaining) ads use Project Wonderful. Advertisers will have to bid specifically on this site to get on, and I have full veto power to tell them where to shove it.

I can also (as you can see) control the minimum amount they pay. If they can’t stretch to the heady heights of a dollar per day to sell their wares to you, my respected reader, then I don’t think they deserve the ad-space.

This rant is basically me vocalising my current annoyance whilst in the middle of sorting out the mess that is our current adverts. One day I’ll win the lottery and make this site ad-free. Until then, sorry about the dust and do let me know if you have any complaints or suggestions.

This rant turned out to be much less interesting than I envisioned. Umm… EXPLODING PINEAPPLES AND SEXY PANDAS. Sweet, got it back. I’m going to go eat a doughnut.