Advertising on the Forum: What, Where, When, Why, How?

[danp]

What?

Over the next few weeks The Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association is going to begin toying with selling advertising space on the discussion forum.

Why?

When the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association was started in March of 2006, we had no idea what it would grow into. I personally thought it'd be a moderately popular forum with a few hundred users and not a lot of traffic. Quite simply, I did not in a million years believe that in just over 2 years we'd be reaching 10,000 registered users, be involved in court cases, and be rumored to be read by many legislators in Harrisburg. Our growth has been both impressive and exponential.

While this is an awesome turn of events that I am quite happy with and proud of, it does not come without responsibilities and costs. As of right now our hosting is provided for free by doug on his servers. PAFOA's website eats up gigs of data in storage and hundreds of gigabytes/month in bandwidth, all on his dime. While there is no emergency situation where this needs to change quickly, eventually PAFOA will outgrow his capabilities to host us at all, let alone for free.

Similar hosting would cost PAFOA thousands of dollars in up front costs for servers and hosting along with (according to our best calculations right now) about $600+/month in hosting fees. While you guys are extremely generous with your donations and over the past few months have actually come pretty close to donating about that much each month, it is not a reliable source of revenue for the organization that we can always count on.

Advertising solves this problem very efficiently for a few reasons:

1. PAFOA gets a lot of traffic: As if right now PAFOA receives about 15,000 unique visitors a day and about 80,000 page views. This means that every month about 500,000 people visit the site and view a total of 2,500,000 pages. This traffic is worth a lot of money. To put this in perspective I run another small-site on the side that gets about 500 page views/day and pulls in anywhere from $5-$10/day. Multiplied to the 80,000 page views/day we receive thats potentially $800-$1,600/day we could pull in from advertising. While that's obviously a very rough estimate and I doubt we'll actually do that, the potential is there to more than offset all of our costs.
2. Advertising benefits everyone involved: Advertisers find new customers and make money, forum readers find new stores, ranges, etc, and PAFOA generates income that will be used to protect the rights of all involved. The main point here is that users don't have to pay a dime. They just have to do what they do and ignore the ads or click ones that interest them.
3. Advertising is Automated: One of the biggest problems faced by PAFOA is the fact that it has no employees, everyone dedicates their limited free time to running it. Just keeping up with the forum and the email takes about 75% of available time. All other solutions for raising money (selling stuff, having paid memberships, etc) would require a massive investment of time which would cut into the time available to actually Get Stuff Done. Letting a bunch of computers spit out links 24/7/365 requires very little maintenance.

Where?

Right now we are looking at ad zones in two places:

1. Header: Below the main navigation & above the forum navigation.
2. First Post: Below the first post of each thread.

This could change over time if we find more effective places to put them.

When?

Starting now.

How?

Right now it's looking like our ads will be served and sold through the advertising network AdBrite. AdBrite is a company that links advertisers and publishers together. The basic process of such a setup is:

1. A Publisher (like PAFOA) creates an account with AdBrite and says "We have ad space for sale".
2. An Advertiser comes along and says "I want to advertise on PAFOA".
3. AdBrite charges the Advertiser for the placement of their ads based on a price we set or a price that is automatically calculated based on demand.
4. PAFOA then starts showing the ads bought by the Advertiser
5. At the end of every month AdBrite gives PAFOA our cut of the Advertisers payments to AdBrite.

If you would like to advertise with PAFOA, keep an eye out for links like "Advertise with PAFOA" in the places listed in the Where? section. If you see one, follow the link and AdBrite will walk you through the process.

When you purchase advertising with PAFOA you will have two choices for how you want to do it:

1. Pay-Per-Click: You state the most you are willing to pay for every click generated by the ads. If you are willing to pay $0.10/click and someone else is willing to pay $0.20/click, their ads will most likely show higher in the list and more often than yours. You won't however have to pay any more than is necessary (Eg, if your max bid is $0.25 but the next max bid is $0.10, you'll probably only actually pay $0.11)
2. Text Links: You pay a flat fee for having your ad in place 24/7 for a specified period of time (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, etc) with no relation to how many people actually click it.

Our hope is that firearm-related businesses throughout Pennsylvania will over time begin purchasing advertising space on PAFOA through AdBrite, especially ones that post on the forum and in the classifieds sections.

Conclusion

This is a fairly inevitable and necessary step for PAFOA and I sincerely hope that no one gets too upset about it. Nothing in life is free and we've done our best to put this off until it has become necessary, but the fact of the matter is, it just has to be done and the sooner we do it the better. For the first few weeks you guys might see some really dumb ads for credit cards and personal injury lawyers but as more businesses directly target PAFOA the ads will become more relevant to everyone's interests. Please bear with us during that transitional time.

If you are a business that is interested in advertising with PAFOA please do me a favor and post here so I can keep track.

I will answer any questions people might have.

[danp]

Frequently Asked Questions

Will this be permanent?

As long as it works out well, yes. In the first few weeks we might see a lot of junk ads, I ask that people just ignore them for the time being. If after a few weeks no one is buying advertising and no one is clicking on advertising, we might look for something else. I have no intention of running ads for ring tones and personal injury lawyers in the long term.

Just for fun: We've already made $0.11!

[Damage control]

FYI Your website at http://www.pafoa.org/ is worth 150,310.00

http://directory.sootle.com/website-worth/


DC

[danp]

Bump, I'm surprised more people have not posted about this.

[HiredGoon]

Originally Posted by danp

... I have no intention of running ads for ring tones and personal injury lawyers in the long term.

That was one concern I had when I saw ads. Junk stuff like that, I think would detract from the
professionalism of this forum as we have come to know it.

[danp]

Originally Posted by HiredGoon

That was one concern I had when I saw ads. Junk stuff like that, I think would detract from the
professionalism of this forum as we have come to know it.

Yeah that would be terrible. The way it's set up now I have to approve every person who wants to advertise on our site, but it took a while for all the engines to start up and get the gears turning.

The ones I am seeing now are advertisers I accepted, I no longer see credit cards and dating websites. EDIT: I still see some car ads now and then, not sure where those are coming from.

They might come back now and then until we get enough real advertisers on board. Hopefully we can get a bunch of PA ranges stores etc on board.

[Shawn.L]

fantastic !

this speaks volumes for what has been done here, I think that as much good as we have done already the future keeps looking brighter !

Now, can we get gun makers to advertise and give discounts to pafoa members who buy through said links?

cause, I like buying guns.............

[doug]

Once the adbrite code is on the forums for a while, the traffic estimates for PAFOA at adbrite will look better.
If you follow the 'Advertise with PAFOA' link you'll see it says we get 'over 10 visitors' a day! OMG!

[doug]

Originally Posted by Damage control

FYI Your website at http://www.pafoa.org/ is worth 150,310.00

http://directory.sootle.com/website-worth/


DC

Cool! Let's sell it to CeaseFirePA and buy a Yacht! :P

<just kidding.....>

[Shawn.L]

Originally Posted by doug

Cool! Let's sell it to CeaseFirePA and buy a Yacht! :P

or a golden submarine


someone here just has to get that reference