Sitenotes: The Advertising on Ertai’s Lament

Awhile back, we kicked off an experiment to see whether or not it would be feasible to run advertising on the site. We’d been approached by WordPress to see if we wanted to participate, and as you may have noticed a couple of ads have appeared here and there as you navigate about. We ran a poll to get your feedback, and have had some time to digest the results.

It’s a hard thing to look at people in an aggregated manner. For instance, less than a quarter of people who responded to the site found that the ads detracted from their experience in some way. Far and away most of you either didn’t mind (64%) or didn’t care (14%). We don’t want to look at those who reacted negatively and say, “well, your opinion falls within a statistically small bracket, so we’re not going to listen.” I don’t believe that we could have gotten where we are today with the site if that was the manner in which we operated. By the same token, it doesn’t feel like that’s enough for us to want to break with the program altogether.

That said, we don’t like shills, and we don’t like feeling like we’re trying to “peddle eyeballs on screens” for a plain envelope stuffed with filthy lucre, either. After consideration, we here at Ertai’s Lament are going to go a third way.

1. We’re going to keep the ads. Unless things radically change, most of you don’t seem to mind them, and it’s nice to have a small revenue stream trickling in.

2. That said, we recognise that it’s you, our readers, who are driving the revenue. Sure, you can say that it’s our content that gets you here, but at the end of the day it’s you the advertisers are after- not us. Soooo…

3. You get to have it. All of it. We’re going to take the cash and put it right into funding giveaways and promotions for the site. One of the things we’ve truly enjoyed these past couple of years is having lots of contests, since it gives us a way to share our love of precons in a material way, and gives other folk a chance to play with decks they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to acquire.

The WordAds revenue stream comes in $100 chunks, so we won’t see anything directly until we cross that threshold, but in the meantime we’ll continue with the ordinary giveaway manner. We’re not sure if we’ll use it for extra-big contests a few times a year, or just have a larger number of smaller ones, but hey, that’s a nice problem to have.

So again, we want to thank everyone for their support of Ertai’s Lament. Without it, the site wouldn’t be what it is today, and we’re glad to have the opportunity to give something back. We hope we haven’t lost anyone over the ads, and when the day comes that we feel strongly that they get in the way of what we deliver, we’ll pull the plug on them.

PS- Since ‘gamers gonna game,’ it’s worth pointing out that revenue is driven by the number of visits. If you’d like to help increase the amount that goes into the kitty, you’re always welcome to visit the site more often!