Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've found that asking nicely without being intrusive gets better results. At PortableApps.com, if you block ads, I have it set to show a single unobtrusive message using the same fonts, colors, and backgrounds as the rest of the site in the area where the first ad would appear. The message says "Please Help Support Us: Please consider white-listing us or making a donation so we can keep bringing you awesome apps. If you recently donated, thank you!" It's designed so that when it appears after detecting that the ad isn't shown, it doesn't make the page jump size/layout wise. In the text, 'white-listing us' links to instructions to whitelist the site and 'making a donation' links to our donations page. The detection script even cleans up the bits of background from hiding the other ads so the page still looks clean.

It helps that I have the site setup to only show a single ad above the fold for the majority of users and don't allow popovers, popunders, overlays, sound, etc.

Eventually, I'd like to add an option to display a message for donation accounts or something similar, but recurring payments and Drupal don't really play well anymore. The only supported add-on in existence is now Recurly. They're pricing was $1,200 a year but they switched it to "Ask for a Quote" (aka expensive but we don't want to say), so it's not something we'd be able to afford for the number of users.

Hi, and thanks for posting the content provider viewpoint. While you're here, I have a question. I'd consider white-listing, but am not willing to white-list ad networks and trackers since they also get misused as a malware vector.

Would you consider hosting your own ads? Is that still a thing? Trust isn't transitive, so it's still a problem even if we're OK with you in particular.

We're not big enough for the time and effort to make hosting the ads ourselves work. We can't even pay someone to manage our online ads the way things normally work with larger publishers so, like the vast majority of smaller publishers, have to go the automated route of Google AdSense or similar. We've worked on other funding ideas including donations, merchandise, and the like, but these only work for a very small niche of publishers.

Side note: Tracking is an unfortunate reality in today's market. We use Google Analytics for statistics because anyone that even thinks about partnering in any way wants to see that. They don't trust your internal stats as a general rule, since you could easily fake them. So, anyone that fully blocks tracking (Google Analytics et al) is looked at as sunk cost since you don't count as a user in terms of potential partnerships and you cost money in terms of machine time and bandwidth.

I'm personally not a fan of this sort of tracking and wish there was another commercially viable option. I make donations available for folks who want to support the site directly. Even though we have a passionate community and many of them make donations, the unfortunate reality is that without the ads, I'd have to shut the site down. Either that or turn it into a paid commercial product, vastly shrinking the userbase but increasing the revenue, just to keep it going. I'm exploring some paid options, but many of them require a decent sized upfront capital investment that I don't currently have access to.

At https://officesnapshots.com we’ve sold and hosted our own ads for the last 5 years. It seems to work well for all involved (us, readers, advertisers).

And I see those ads with uBlock Origin installed, congratulations, you're doing it right! I've seen this on one other site in probably the past 10 years. I think it was a custom furniture site I couldn't afford anything on but I was so surprised to see ads and that they weren't tracking me, I emailed just to cheer them on.

Yep hosting your own ads is the way to go. This way you are actually in control of your own content instead of relying on Google.

The problem is that you need to be big enough to negotiate your own ad deals. Hosting your own ads isn’t the challenge. Good luck with that.

My thinking is that the most difficult part is creating a website where people want to advertise specifically, then connecting with those people, with the easiest part being the actual negotiation stage.

For those looking to jump into direct sales and self-hosting, my suggestion is to create a second position of an ad unit you sell through a network and try to sell that without removing your existing ad network unit. Then work to contact the people who advertise on your site through the network and try to sign them up directly.

Chances are you can save them money while still bringing in more revenue as you no longer share revenue with the network.

Marco Arment - a one man development shop set up his own ad network for his podcast app....

I don't see ads and I don't see your message.. I didn't even realise you were ad supported. Which means my adblocker is working right! But also means unfortunately that I sometimes don't get to unblock websites which I do want to support. Just donated.

I would feel much more inclined to donate generally if I could see how much a service needs to operate and how much they have so far raised. Then I can see a direct path of my meagre contribution. I don't know why this info needs to be secret for a free service (though there might be a good reason).

Aside:I wonder if anyone on HN know if its possible I wonder to whitelist and sandbox a site which uses an ad network like adsense? As I generally block networks as a matter of course. (not so much because it stops them tracking me personally.. just because I think they shouldn't be tracking).

If you're looking at the homepage, you won't see it there. I wanted the homepage to be clean. Click through into, say, features, and you should see the message in the upper left below the main navigation (on desktop).

Slightly off topic, but as someone who works at a company that uses Drupal for e-commerce sites, I'm surprised there isn't a good (free) module for recurring payments. Definitely sounds useful though - I'll have to bring it up sometime.

There were a handful of them but they've all been abandoned and are listed on the Drupal site as such, complete with the requisite 'our security update and notification policy doesn't apply to this' warnings.

Could you use Patreon to allow for recurring payments? Seems like Portable Apps would be ideal for that use-case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com