43 Actions: Google AdSense advertising
Running a web application with the kind of daily traffic of a site like 43actions.com brings with it some quite substantial costs in bandwidth and hosting fees—in addition to the cost of the time it takes to actually develop the application.
To help move towards attaining a sustainable business model—so we can continue to stay online in the future, for the benefit of all our users, business or otherwise—we decided that a small step towards that sustainability was to add Google AdSense’s textual ads to certain portions of the application.
As long-time netizens ourselves, we are well aware of how sensitive the advertising issue still is for most people, including ourselves. It is always a compromise, since nothing in this world is free when you go to through the whole stack. What appears free on the surface is always subsidized in one way or another; by regular ads, corporate goodwill or viral/sneaky advertising, or user donations, to take some examples. We hope that this will have a minimal impact on how you use and experience 43 Actions in your daily life. And we are naturally very, very keen on hearing from all of our users about how this impacts you specifically. The system is not set in stone.
As a curious sidenote; many of us here at 43 Actions, who have tested this new advertising system for the last couple of weeks, have found that we actually like having the ads show up once in a while! How strange, you say?
The reason is that, because Google AdSense gives you ads that relates to the written text on the page (though never linking it to a specific user—keeping your privacy), they become more like tiny suggestions, from companies and services that you might actually care about. The ads simply become quite helpful, which is very much Google’s entire philosophy behind this approach. Now, YMMV, and if you are decidedly against advertising in all its forms, make sure to read the rest of this article.
Special message to donors: For all our users who will, or already have donated to us via PayPal, we will turn off the display of ads completely, if you so wish. (Cf. above discussion.) Additionally; going forward, donors will have exclusive access for quite some time to major new features. In fact, we will have more to say on that matter this very week, since the next feature update is already in the final stages of development and testing! Send us your best guess on what you think it will be :)
Adding all donors to the database is unfortunately at this stage a mostly manual effort. We have already begun this process, and will take care of everyone as quickly as possible through the coming days and weeks, starting with the early donors. If you think your account has taken too long to get updated, make sure to send us an email with “donations” in the subject line. It is very important that you email us from the same account you donated to PayPal with. Also, make sure you clearly state your 43 Actions username and email address. All this makes sure that we are able to find you in the database as quickly as possible. Many thanks for your generous contribution!
4 years ago