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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2WS-Steve" data-source="post: 1744124" data-attributes="member: 3289">While this would probably count as a Meta thread I figure it's of enough interest to publishers that it would be worthwhile to post it here.Some of the problems Morrus mentioned seems to arise from the nature of advertising here. While my experience is a bit out of date, when I did have books in the pipeline I noticed that a month long banner ad generated a strong response -- but not much better than a couple news items. In effect, the tremendous success of the news page undermines the site's ability to sell advertising.That creates a moral dissonance for everyone involved. Morrus wants to maintain the place as a location for news about gaming, as well as other things, but doing so devalues the very thing that pays for the server. I imagine many good meaning publishers want to support the place with advertising (and certainly have done so in the past) but have a hard time justifying that as a pure business decision. Since people are much happier and the world is a better place when business interests coincide with our better natures, I figure a good solution would be to make the advertising sufficiently effective that it gets publishers clamoring for ad space.Steve Trustrum apparently has some suggestions for this, so those might be worth looking at. Also, I imagine publishers have some of their own ideas about what they'd want to see in terms of advertising options--and hopefully they'll make some suggestions here.I'm certainly no expert, but I'll blather on anyway.First, the banner ads strike me as too small. Any other site that provides content as valuable as this has much larger, and often more elaborate banners--Yahoo, Weather.com, news sites, and so on. As a fan, it wouldn't bother me at all if you made the banners larger, or allowed more elaborate features in them.Also, given the way browsers work, banner ads at the top can get scrolled off the screen pretty easily in a visit. Perhaps banners that stretch vertically along the right side would be more effective. I'm sure there's extensive research on this available somewhere though and I know I'm often surprised by what works in advertising and what doesn't.Some publishers don't know how to put an ad together. I've seen more than a few ads that give me no idea about what they're selling, and some that have to scroll through too long an animation before I figure out what's going on. An article here with some basics of advertising via banner would probably help out those people unfamiliar with the process. For what it's worth, the simplicity of the DriveThruRPG ad has been particularly effective in getting me to click on it.The front page center Dunjinni ad has been particularly effective on me as well. I notice it all the time and feel my will weakening daily.Finally, as a fan, advertising on ENWorld isn't even a burden. I love seeing what various publishers and people around the net have in the pipeline. I enjoy reading the ads in Dragon and Dungeon. Given the sheer number of visitors to this site, and the number of distinct visitors all of whom have an interest in precisely what d20 publishers sell, there must be some way to make the advertising here something that will satisfy everyone involved.</blockquote>

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