TheFoothillsForum

This site gets around 2000 unique visitors a month, with 130k page views. Some rough calculations would suggest that amount of traffic would result in about $20/month (probably a bit more) if I put some Google AdSense ads on the site.

I have no desire to make any money off this site, but it feels silly to ignore 'free money'. So I thought maybe we can put the ads up, and use the money to pay for a 'forum gathering' or donate it to a community cause, or something else (suggestions welcome).

The ads would be as unobtrusive as possible (probably in the page footer), and there would be monthly or weekly status on how much money is in the 'Forum Fund'.

Thoughts?

Go for it. I wondered why you waited so long.

I think it's a good idea too, especially the part about donating the money to a good cause in the community.

Great idea! I would advertise. Donating money to community is good too but there is nothing wrong with you getting paid for all the hours of work you do and money you spend keeping the site going too. IMHO.

Wow, I surprised there hasn't been at least one post saying 'If there are ads I will never come back!'. I forget that this site doesn't attract the average internet users

Hummingbird: I wasn't going to try to get local advertisers directly. If you want to advertise here, feel free to post in the Local Business section (100% free of charge, I figure it if a local business ads actually help everyone, so no need to charge for them).

I'll integrate some Google text ads over over the weekend, and see what everyone has to say.

Ok I did that. Man I am terrible at doing that ADs stuff. Tony is way better. He'll kill me for not letting him post it and put it together.

Go for it!

The ads are up, you have to scroll way down to the bottom of the page to see them, hopefully making them as unobtrusive as possible. They're reasonably targeted now, and should get better as Google indexes more of the site for ad display.

That's funny, I don't even scroll down that far, so it won't bother me at all. LOL

We're up to a whopping $17 of ad revenue!

I think I'm going to run the ads more prominently for users who are not registered or logged in. That should encourage unregistered users to register, and maybe get a few more ad clicks too.

Almost up to $31!

Page impressions Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM [?] Earnings
The Foothills Forum 226,538 31 0.01% $0.14 $30.97

Haven't updated this in a while... we're now up to $76.74, but Google only pays out once you reach $100.

The Foothills Forum 641,983 83 0.01% $0.12 $76.74

In the spirit of the holidays, I've added more ads to the site for guests (users who aren't logged in). How is this holiday related? Well, if we can get to $100 soon, then we can figure out some sort of holiday related use for the money. Perhaps a donation to the the charity QueenOfTheMountain posted about?

I try to click on them if I see one of interest to me. We all need to do a LOT more clicking cuz $78 doesn't go very far. Great idea Admin.

Fine with me. And keep the money.
Les

That's a good point to make... please don't click on the ads just just to help generate advertising revenue. Google is *very* smart, and if they detect that people are 'fradulantly' clicking the ads, they won't send us the check.