a few vendors has inquired about advertising in BF. as we know, advertising is not allowed in the MarketPlace forum as it is strictly for private / non-business sellers only. right now, BC/BF/BR are not set up for banner ads except for Google Ads. so if anybody wants to advertise in BC/BF/BR, you can sign up with Google and make sure your Ads are visible via the Adsense program. thanks.
kwun, you can set up your board for taking ads very easily. Make an iframe where the ad would go. Randomly pick between sets of adds using php. Takes only about 4 lines of script.
Aside from the pool of badminton knowledge and general sense of community here at BF, the lack of intrusive advertisments is one thing I really like about the forum. The text-based Google ads here are informative and yet completely unintrusive, blending in very well with the rest of the forum. Kudos to kwun for having such good tastes. If it is possible, please keep those ugly banner ads away from the forum. (I promise I'll be contributing to the BC-BF-BR fund in the near future, and I plead that others who are enjoying the forum to do the same as well.) -Rick
I think that BF should have some advertising. Good badminton shops aren't always easy to find on the web, and this forum could help expose them. Anything that helps badminton grow as a sport is surely in our best interests - and that includes commercial interests. The problem is that the members of this board are widely distributed geographically. You could address that by doing a regional thing, serving up ads appropriate to the clients IP address (which on the global level is fairly easy to locate). Or you could serve up random ads with a frequency distribution that approximates the membership distrution. Or you could ignore it totally and just serve ads for whoever pays regardless of location. A site that has fairly tasteful advertising is http://forums.vwvortex.com Vendors can sponsor individual forums on a monthly basis, and this gets them a small banner in that forum, and also the right to post a 'sticky' special offer for that month. I don't know how well that would translate to BF's forum list, but it's worth considering. I'm not advocating turning this site into banner hell, but I do feel that there is room for Kwun to offset the maintenance costs and help the sport grow at the same time.
Traum, thanks for reading and agreeing with my intentions. Sliced Drop, thanks for the suggestion. i think what you have suggested is a viable alternative. however, Google Ads are working out well for us currently and i am not planning for an alternative right now. the intention of the Ads in BC/BF/BR are not really to get rich but instead to make the site self-sustaining. however, i also want to satisfy the advertising needs of vendors so i wanted to let them know that Google Ads is the way to do it.
I think it would make more sense to advertise straight on here though. It costs about 10-30 cents a click to do it on Google and you only see a small portion of that. (The cost to get a #1 position on badmintonforum is currently around $2-3 a click i believe.) Further, directly advertising on BF would allow more advertising options as google is very restrictive (must have a title and two lines or a fixed length.) There need not be tacky ads though. They can use the same style as google or even less ugly. (The bright red bar across the googleAd is an eyesore, imho, and could be removed.) Here's how I see a typical BF text ad:
due to the contract with Google, i can't tell how much they pay per click, but i can tell you that it is really really tiny.
I thought BRL had worked this out already in another section of this forum? Was it not in the forum feedback section?
