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Current Ad/Site Experience

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WaterburyCane said:
Pay Me GIF
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Listen to Teddy KGB ^^^^^
 
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WaterburyCane said:
Have to disagree with you there fella. As of now, this IS a free site. There is no forum, article, or any content that any of us are excluded from, regardless of pay status.
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Yea but for these ads to not pop up we have to pay. We always had ads but these big *** ads mysteriously pop up right when the ad-free service appears.
 
GiffordCane98 said:
Yea but for these ads to not pop up we have to pay. We always had ads but these big *** ads mysteriously pop up right when the ad-free service appears.
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It’s still a choice they are giving us.

The owners of the site have the right to monetize this. Even just to break even, there are certain operating costs to keep this site going. You need a CDN, possible additional security tools/features that the CDN may or may not be adequate enough with like a WAF, DDoS/BOT mitigation, application security, etc. Andrew may be using some open source tools for other needed software to run a site like this, but some of the tools needed costs money. Not to mention the time it takes to run this. We log on and see the finished product, but a lot goes into it on the backend.

This is a **** well run site and I think the owners have found a reasonable balance of monetizing while giving us the option of allowing paid ads on while we browse or allowing us to pay a tiny fee for a better ad free experience to offset the loss of ad revenue.

Anyways, that’s my 2 cents. If the ads are giving you that big of a headache, it sounds justifiable to budget and carve out $25. I’m sure 99% of this board can look back at the past month and find 25 bucks that they’ve spent that they could have done without or sacrificed. That situation will probably come up in the next 30 days. Convenience is rarely free in life.
 
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GiffordCane98 said:
Yea but for these ads to not pop up we have to pay. We always had ads but these big *** ads mysteriously pop up right when the ad-free service appears.
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You are correct. During COVID we saw a decline in traffic (because there was no football news) and a decline in revenue per impression (because the ad market was way down). We decided to add more ads and create an option for users to opt out of ads.
 
WaterburyCane said:
It’s still a choice they are giving us.

The owners of the site have the right to monetize this. Even just to break even, there are certain operating costs to keep this site going. You need a CDN, possible additional security tools/features that the CDN may or may not be adequate enough with like a WAF, DDoS/BOT mitigation, application security, etc. Andrew may be using some open source tools for other needed software to run a site like this, but some of the tools needed costs money. Not to mention the time it takes to run this. We log on and see the finished product, but a lot goes into it on the backend.

This is a **** well run site and I think the owners have found a reasonable balance of monetizing while giving us the option of allowing paid ads on while we browse or allowing us to pay a tiny fee for a better ad free experience to offset the loss of ad revenue.

Anyways, that’s my 2 cents. If the ads are giving you that big of a headache, it sounds justifiable to budget and carve out $25. I’m sure 99% of this board can look back at the past month and find 25 bucks that they’ve spent that they could have done without or sacrificed. That situation will probably come up in the next 30 days. Convenience is rarely free in life.
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We have a dedicated server from liquid web and use Cloudflare. Over the next few months, we plan to offload our images onto Amazon AWS because our HD is 94% full. Elastic Search stops working at 95% full.
 
I think @RVACane gave me a Pro Bono.

No homo guys...I just haven't been seeing any ads and I am a cheapskate.

Though I guess that's now likely to change.
 
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Andrew said:
We have a dedicated server from liquid web and use Cloudflare. Over the next few months, we plan to offload our images onto Amazon AWS because our HD is 94% full. Elastic Search stops working at 95% full.
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Nice. Hopefully the AWS transition will be smooth for you. Interesting that Elastic stops working at 95% capacity. A lot of people seem to like Elastic. They actually recently acquired a company I know one of the investors in. Good luck
 
WaterburyCane said:
Nice. Hopefully the AWS transition will be smooth for you. Interesting that Elastic stops working at 95% capacity. A lot of people seem to like Elastic. They actually recently acquired a company I know one of the investors in. Good luck
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Xenforo has a really good file system handler that should make the transition to AWS rather smooth. ES is really good stuff, search index tables are always really bad on forums so eliminating they need for that is totally worth to price we paid for the Xenforo ES add-on.
 
JHallCanes said:
It’s the same strategy as pretty much everything web or app based in the last decade
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No it's not. I work with several major content sites, and these ads are more intrusive, and the lack of form factor awareness is a major negative customer sat driver. The ads often literally sit on top of the button you need to click so you can't get to the content (e.g., using the recruiting filter searches).

Also, another poster is correct in that while this is a content site, most of the content is generated by the members in these discussions. So it's not really "free" is it? It's more symbiotic, where CIS draws value from the membership just as much as the members derive value from CIS.

While I recognize part of that is because cleaning up the ad slop is a low priority for the paid staff, I have to agree with @ejfudd that the ads as they are served up today are not a sustainable model.
 
grover said:
No it's not. I work with several major content sites, and these ads are more intrusive, and the lack of form factor awareness is a major negative customer sat driver. The ads often literally sit on top of the button you need to click so you can't get to the content (e.g., using the recruiting filter searches).

Also, another poster is correct in that while this is a content site, most of the content is generated by the members in these discussions. So it's not really "free" is it? It's more symbiotic, where CIS draws value from the membership just as much as the members derive value from CIS.

While I recognize part of that is because cleaning up the ad slop is a low priority for the paid staff, I have to agree with @ejfudd that the ads as they are served up today are not a sustainable model.
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Whoopty do you work for an ad agency like 500k other college grads with nothing to do
 
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grover said:
No it's not. I work with several major content sites, and these ads are more intrusive, and the lack of form factor awareness is a major negative customer sat driver. The ads often literally sit on top of the button you need to click so you can't get to the content (e.g., using the recruiting filter searches).

Also, another poster is correct in that while this is a content site, most of the content is generated by the members in these discussions. So it's not really "free" is it? It's more symbiotic, where CIS draws value from the membership just as much as the members derive value from CIS.

While I recognize part of that is because cleaning up the ad slop is a low priority for the paid staff, I have to agree with @ejfudd that the ads as they are served up today are not a sustainable model.
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We had 9 users upgrade today. Our average is less than 1 user per day so that tells you that today is the exception.
 
This is what it has looked like for the past couple of months when I come to the boards. It hasn't just been today. You can't close the ads the ads either. You have to leave and come back a few times or you can't see anything.
Not a complaint, but just figured some feedback images would help to understand how bad the pop-ups are
 
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JHallCanes said:
Ok. You think I haven’t heard your same drivel thousands of times?

Carry on or I can Venmo you the $25 to shut up
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Merry Christmas, JH! Have some Egg Nog and give those mighty internet muscles of yours a rest.
 
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