Topic: Advertising on the forum no longer supported? (Read 253 times)

As for the lowering the BTC50 donations, it could be seen as unfair to those who actually paid the BTC50 to get their badges.

It's better to strike a deal than an auction type so the forum can choose the kind of ads that is suited for the Bitcoin community,(...)

(...)
Theymos stated that forum does not need new donation when forum members asked for reduction in 50 BTC donation in order to have VIP badge. I can not find that post of theymos at the moment so I quoted the below one instead.

Has the forum officially ceased selling ads? Can anyone explain what was the logic behind that decision (or just link me to relevant post)?

Advertising Phore itself definitely wouldn't be allowed. That's why I initially rejected their bids in the auction. Phore is definitely an "ICO-type-thing", which is explicitly banned from advertising: buying these sorts of tokens is something like buying shares in penny stocks, but even far more risky. However, I interpret this ad as advertising a product of Phore, namely the Graphene ecosystem and apps built on top of it such as their Marketplace. By analogy, I see this like Nikola advertising their fuel cell technology and their maybe-soon-to-be-available vehicles, not Nikola advertising NKLA shares.

Phore only paid about $500 for this ad. It wouldn't make economic sense, especially since many advertisers would have to be checked for every one ad that is accepted, wins slots in the auction, and ends up paying. By memory, I'd guess that in the last 3 years there's been only 2 or 3 ads pulled after acceptance due to something I missed. Bitcointalk.org ads are far more high-quality than eg. AdSense ads are. If even this low level of risk became unacceptable, then it'd make more sense to just not sell ads. (Not selling ads is something that I've considered, since it's a lot of trouble for not really that much return, but without ads the forum's cashflow would currently be way too far in the negative. I'd have to come up with an additional source of revenue first.)

This case seems to be a difference of opinion on policy rather than an issue of something I missed, though. I just see very little potential for harm from this ad, even if Phore's tokens are risky. It seems very unlikely to me that even a single person is going to view this ad and/or read the linked article, develop a desire to invest in Graphene despite the lack of any real suggestion from the ad/article to do so, do the research to figure out that they need to buy Phore tokens to get Graphene tokens, and go do that. Rather, the purpose of the ad seems to be to improve Graphene's reputation as a platform for dApps, not to attract investment. The state of the ad auction was such that rejecting Phore's ad would've resulted in no loss in revenue whatsoever; I allowed it as a matter of fairness/consistency.

In any case, I thought I recalled Theymos saying the forum's finances were such that no more donations were needed

The forum has enough budget/reserve for many years that funds getting from forum ads is unnecessary anymore.
With the mixers issue and selective scamming of gambling sites, since these two are the most service who get ad slots here, it really make sense theymos stopping forum ads being undecided on what service he will accept.

Is the forum only generating revenue from donations now? Doesn't seem like a viable business model.

-snip

If there are no auctions anymore and the duration is determined individually for each advertiser, then what would the "round" refer to in these stats?

Read here- https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.60976136

If you check last post of that thread you linked, you see the reason.

According to the ads stats(https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats), the current round is already on 358 (January 28 to February 27). I believe Theymos is only accepting an offer and not through the form of ad sales auction like the previous version.

Rounds are getting updated automatically as theymos didn't remove the ad slots from the forum. Currently, 9 slots are filled with the below message & the other one is a factoid slot as we had back in the day.

Wow OP, I've been here the entire time you've been taking a break, and I hadn't even noticed the lack of advertising.  Either you're extremely perceptive or I'm at the extreme end of apathy toward such things.

According to the ads stats(https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats), the current round is already on 358 (January 28 to February 27). I believe Theymos is only accepting an offer and not through the form of ad sales auction like the previous version.

The Bitcoin network protocol was designed to be extremely flexible. It can be used to create timed transactions, escrow transactions, multi-signature transactions, etc. The current features of the client only hint at what will be possible in the future.

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.