Note that I've decided to suspend ad sales. These auctions will probably be permanently ended, and I'm not sure whether or in what form advertising in general will be continued. Maybe some ads will go up again fairly soon, or maybe there will never be any more ads; I haven't decided yet. The main reasons for this decision are:
Firstly, I'm finding it too difficult to determine which services are legit/safe and which are not. It takes me 30+ minutes to research each new service to reach at least
some level of confidence in it, but at the end of this I often still don't feel fully confident. Bitcointalk.org is meant to be operated "as a service to the community", so it's very important to me that bitcointalk.org not be seen to be putting profit above the interests of its users. (I've been kind of shocked at the crypto-related ads that are shown on TV, which are often way beyond anything I'd accept here. And I'd like to
tighten our standards.)
Secondly, there is a high amount of friction in the current process of auctions and manual ad processing. I often feel that it's more trouble than it's worth on bitcointalk.org's end. I also think that the revenue is substantially less than it could be because the market of advertisers willing to deal with this difficult process is much smaller than the market of advertisers who would be willing to advertise here if only they could do so effortlessly. So I think that we're "leaving a lot of money on the table" due to friction, which makes the other issues feel even worse.
Finally, bitcointalk.org has a large reserve of BTC, so we're able to continue operating without ad revenue for many years. It's not even necessary to cut expenses or find replacement sources of revenue anytime soon, and I currently have no solid plans to do these things. I do regard it as less than ideal to be operating at a constant loss, especially because it constraints any desired future growth in expenses. Improving this situation will be on my mind in the coming years, but luckily it need not be a high priority.
If you'd like to advertise: I will
consider offers to advertise, especially if you've advertised before. Send me:
- What you want to advertise
- How long you want to advertise for, and starting/ending when
- How much you'll be willing to pay
- If you would prefer some change in the format of ads (ie. something different than the banner below the first post), let me know and I'll consider it
However, my standards for the type of service I will accept will be stricter than previously, and I will also not accept advertising if I don't think that the proposed price is high enough to make it worth the trouble. Due to these changes,
I will probably accept few or no offers to advertise, and the majority of the time there will be no ads.
A possible good long-term solution would be if we could use some ad network in the same vein as AdSense which has extremely high standards, does not track users, and is otherwise as visitor-friendly as possible. If you know of or operate something like this, please let me know.
The main thing that I'll miss about these auctions is being pushed to closely investigate a wide variety of different crypto-services, many of which have been very interesting and innovative, even ones which I've had to reject. Thank you to all advertisers, auction participants, and ad designers over the nearly 11 years since the
first auction. I'd especially like to point out that many, maybe the majority, of ad banners over the last few years were designed by
jayce.
