Yeah, ok I don’t have a P next to my name, but by god, this advert is getting right on my nips.

Staring at a page and this thing suddenly pops up, filling my whole screen.

I get advertising is a necessity, but this one is a right pain!

With that one and the self start ads it’s enough to put you off using the forum.

The self-start ads will stop self-starting after a couple of views.

STR, the pop-up one shouldn’t, I’ll report it.

Go premier. It’s only 2 pounds a month! Look at how much time you spend on here and think about it. 50 pence a week! Less than 10p a day!

Go premier. It’s only 2 pounds a month! Look at how much time you spend on here and think about it. 50 pence a week! Less than 10p a day!

Is that how advertising works?
make the ads as irritating as possible so you pay not to see them.
Silly me, I assumed it was to buy the advertised product.

Must admit it was a pain in the butt yesterday. Not seen it today though.

The National Express one really messes up my i pad, flickers stalls jumps about a bit then has the banner along the bottom. Not the end of the world but does grind my gears a bit.

Pay £2 to not get adverts, is that a loss leader or something?

Go premier. It’s only 2 pounds a month! Look at how much time you spend on here and think about it. 50 pence a week! Less than 10p a day!

As previously discussed. That’s a bag of chips a month 8)

Better to just rely on the kindness of strangers to gift one a P.

Edit: Cheers SC-XC 8)

I stumbled across those DVDs yesterday…completely slipped my mind. Ping over your address and I’ll send em back!

You’ll have to jog my memory. Which DVDs?

The Wire, Hong Kong edition 😉

I did not renew by premier membership because nearly every time I visited STW it had logged me out so had to wait for all of the noisy – visually and aurally – adverts to load before the log-in button appeared.
If STW towers fix that then I’ll defo go Premier again.

Just set your STW bookmark to the login page?

The Wire, Hong Kong edition

Ah, right. Just keep them, or give them to a Hong Kong based charity.

Got some really nice upgrades planned for all subs levels in September. £1.49 is all you need 🙂

re the ads. The ads are meant to only make noises or expand if the user activates the ad. The minimum requirement for that to happen is a 3 second cursor hover over the ad. Any ads that expand without at least that level of interaction or auto play audio with no interaction then please report them to me directly mark@…

The system is more complicated than you would imagine but I will do my best to track down any rogue ads.

Ads are displayed to pay for everything that we do. They are not used to push you into subscribing. I only want your money if you are happy to part with it in exchange for what we offer. If you don’t want to do that then I’m totally fine with people using the site for free so long as there is that understanding that in that case the bills still need to be paid and that’s the job of the ads. What I’m constantly trying to develop are new ways that may tempt you over the line to becoming a subscriber, but deliberately making ads annoying is not one of them.

I much prefer to earn money directly from you guys rather than via faceless ad networks. For a start it means if we do good we get rewarded with more subscriptions. If we do bad then we lose them ie. our fate is in our hands when our bills are paid by you guys. Ad networks don’t care if what we do is good or bad – they come and go and their behaviour and the money they pay is variable and entirely unpredictable – a pair of factors that leads to a few sleepless nights every now and then.

Subscribers FTW 🙂

Mark,
Thanks for the update. I’m sure most people understand the need for ads, I do, and I think most are a small price to pay for STW.

I just wonder at the meeting that must happen in the marketing department of some of the companies that advertise. Do they really think that a pop up, audio/video ad will make people like their product enough to buy it?

Again, not getting at STW at all (I may even take out a sub).

Mitsubishi and United Emirates advert expanded straight away without a cursor going anywhere near them. Annoying when you have to wait for them to finish before you get a chance to log in and remove the adverts.

Is it just me that doesn’t see ads? i’m not a subscriber, suspect it may be the safari ad blocker.

Dom

That’s odd. The Emirates ad is definitely user activated. It is a billboard so that means it’s 970×250 pixels as standard. It expands to full page when you float over it. Is it automatically going full page?

Emirates ad plays when opening page for me, does not expand, which is fine if I can mute the sound but not good at other times.
The Mitsubushi ad expands whenever the cursor crosses it, as in every time I go to scroll down the page.

Don’t get any ads, just got grey bars down either side.

every time I visited STW it had logged me out so had to wait for all of the noisy – visually and aurally – adverts to load before the log-in button appeared.

I must admit I grumble about this, although not so much to not keep subscribing… when you get logged out every now and then, the login link is the very last thing to load!

Nat express messes the site up on an ipad

No issue with ads obviously but that pop up National express ad at the bottom of the screen completely screws up viewing the site on my ipad/iphone. Forum flashes and blinks and jumps sizes until I close the ad. The process starts over as soon as I open a thread.