RPGDot says 'Goodbye'

They pay their authors for the articles they write? If that includes their walkthroughs, then I say "money well spent", otherwise, most of their editorial articles aren't worth the bandwidth (unlike most here).

Gorath said:

AFAIK GameBanshee pays its authors (correct me if I'm wrong). They have to find this money somewhere.

Click to expand...

I accept that most WEB sites have some ads on their WEB pages to pay for people working on the site. The problem with GameBanshee is not the ads frequency on their pages, but the TYPE of ads they have. It think it could be possible to find advertisers who don't show photos of half-nude women from Russia or other places to lure you into joining a dating site.

I know that if I enter such a site like GameBanshee to read news about Dragon Age 2 and my wife goes by my computer I will have a hard time explaining that I'm just reading news about RPG games and not drooling over the photos shown in the ads.

So if RPGWatch one time in the future will need to get money from ads I hope they will have the class to avoid accepting money from companies that many people will see as sleazy. I'm pretty sure GameBanshee could have found decent companies that could have advertised on their web site.

Peter makes a very good point. Ads should fit the nature of the site.

RPGWatch could place ads for indies in here, for example. That would boost the knowledge about them.
The only problem would be how much to pay for it; I'd say microtransactions would do it. I don't think an online ad needs much money - other than for the generated traffic.

It's quite simple how indies could pay: PPA affiliate program. Many already have something like that.

Your donations have paid for the operational cost in 2010 and the move to a new server in November (we have the current one for 3 years already).
We basically only run ads from Good old Games, with only limited income (up to now a whopping 68 Euros ). The income from GoG is limited but it is steady and based on the purchases you make at GoG (at least when you registered with them after clicking on our banner)

We get requests on a regular basis for advertising deals, but most of them are rather generic in nature and you don't know what kind of ads you are getting as there is no control over them. I can't look in the future, but we are sticking with the plan that we only want ads that are related to games, preferably to RPGs, no pop-ups, no pop-unders and especially no ads that want to install something (all the stuff we had in the Jolt days of RPGDot). In addition we want to have the option open to kill the ads when they start doing nasty stuff after a while (again something we had with RPGDot).

Our current design does not allow for much space when it comes to ads. everyone wants their ads to be above the fold and want exclusivity and I can not give them that in our current design.
You might have noticed the word 'current' being used twice There is some fooling around with a new design, which might or might not happen one day in the future. It still won't have much room for ads, Just one or two two above the fold on the home page and just one on all pages (similar to what we have now).

Having ads on RPGWatch was and is not high on the priority list right now.

What about google adsense ? I don't remember them being very annoying. I see them a lot, don't click on them a lot, but they're free to place and might add a a few extra euros a month.

Or is there something else wrong with them ?