Topic: No more banner advertising: what's next? (Read 903 times)

I am sure theymos isn't considering such actions. He is aware what that would do to the activity of Bitcointalk. Posts written thanks to signature campaigns and various bounty activities amount to 85-90% of the forum's activity. Remove that, and you are left with 30-40 bitcoiners participating in an occasional discussion or two.

Imagine running a food market and deciding to ban the sale of fresh fruit and vegetables, and allowing only seeds and animal food, for example. You are still going to have customers, but you stabbed yourself in the eye just to see if you will bleed. There is no need to do that.

If we read the text it is clear that theymos does not want to spend 30 mins to figure out of the services offered by the ads are legit or not.
He has a lot of money so the forum can be run without any ad advertisement.

Signature campaigns are something different as money from the signature campaign does not go in the pocket of admins, it is spent by the project owners for advertisement and distributed to the posters here. Forum gets indirect benefit from them in the form of traffic.

Assuming the forum software is free, since the version has been discontinued eons ago, there are hosting plans and CDN (Cloudflare) services although there are custom-priced ones to accommodate the traffic, monthly expenses might reach several hundred dollars. Bitcointalk is mainly about the traffic so there are no SaaS or funds here to guard against threats.

We haven't factored in mods and staffs payrolls yet, but those are a portion from the ad sales IIRC. Current funds should be more than sufficient to sustain the entire operation even after we die.

Another similar option (with similar benefits) would be to allow people to purchase merit from the forum in order to rank up. I think a lot of people would probably be interested in buying Lamborghini memberships, but some may also be close to Legendary but are struggling to get enough merit to rank up, and may want to pay to get the ranking.

I disagree. In my experience, theymos is open to listening to arguments in favor of changing policy, and will do so if a sufficiently strong argument is made.

It seems that theymos already seems to be open to long-term deals, as he said that he will accept private offers to advertise. I think long-term deals are more of an issue for advertisers because there are many unknown variables, such as how effective an ad is, forum traffic in the future, how profitable a business will be in the future, etc.

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Theymos mentioned that he thought the process of buying ad space has a lot of friction. This could be addressed by automating the process of which advertisers purchase advertising. The initial vetting/setup is probably something that shouldn't be automated. Someone could potentially create an automated ad buying software that advertisers could buy ads on. I am not sure if the cost of creating these software would be worth the potentially higher revenue for the forum, especially if it needs to be integrated with the existing SMF software.

Back when I suggested that we take part in advertising good Bitcoin projects and services for free, I PMed theymos to see what he feels about it and whether or not he would be willing to help in providing some ad space for these campaigns. Regular ad sales were still a thing back then, of course, but there were also factoid slots. He said he would think about giving out some factoid slots if the projects that are advertised aren't for profit. The best thing is to just PM theymos and see how he feels about it. 

I think we are missing the point here because Theymos never really ban the forum banner ad he said "If you'd like to advertise: I will consider offers to advertise, especially if you've advertised before."
Technically, he is just concerned about maintaining the standards of this forum by not hosting ads for illegal or scam projects since the time spent researching each project didn't worth it.

Having said that, I believe this forum was created to be the venue for information about announcements, events, establishment, and important grades of blockchain, altcoin, crypto-related business and BTC. For to maintain this standard I don't see the ban of signature ads.

I don't think that theymos is a kind of guy that can easily change his opinions once he makes them, and there could be some legal issues he is concerned for future as well.
Long term sponsorship is not a bad idea per se, but even the best companies can go bust or terminate their business, just look what happened in 2022.

Moderators could probably take over this work, and hiring new people just means more spending of forum funds.

Reality is that there is no magic trick that can fix all this things with creating new ranks in forum.
Sure, I like the idea of generating passive income similar like for Copper membership, but I think creating new ranks will only create more complications, and I doubt many people would spend coins for that.

I don't know how much money is forum exactly spending for maintaining everything running smooth, but I could say the same thing for any other (non-bitcoin) forum that exist today.
How do you think they are managing to stay alive and survive even without having any Bitcoins in their wallets?

Funny how you mention that, because I was also planning to make a digital museum of all Apple product press-release Pages by collecting them from the Wayback Machine.

Personally, I think there's a few things theymos should do rather than nothing.

1) Offer or auction some long term deals to companies that are already trusted and have a history of advertising here. Many of these gambling companies are sponsoring streamers millions a month so I'm sure they'd put up a fairly large amount for a years ad subscription or something.

2) Hire someone trusted to vet all new adverts.

3 Implement Silver/Gold/Platinum/Lamborghini Memberships like the current Copper one that come with the benefits of a Full/Senior/Hero/Legendary etc, and maybe even some additional perks with a higher "premium" rank like the ability to change name, access to a exclusive sub board and so on.

Being able to purchase these memberships have numerous benefits:

Completely passive income for the forum
Essentially stops account sales and farming
Will severely dent people from fishing/begging for merit


Whilst the forum does have a lot of money held in reserves it will only dwindle over time, and there's always the risk of bitcoin having a massive crash. We've already seen it lose well over half its value since the all time high. I'm sure we will see much more volatility over the next ten years with even worse crashes along the way.

I was incorrect about search engines. My bad.
Yeah I am assuming I was too in archive sites to verify authenticity but I don't think I ever considered them to find knowledgeable information to study like I visit blogs, articles and forums.

I do actually, quite a bit... its important in my line of work, which is more-or-less verifying authenticity of claims. And I don't think search engines crawl archives.

The signature campaigns bring free traffic to the forum. It would not be a good idea to ban them.

And who reads archived information? I have been using internet since 2001 and I can not remember any archive site where I was looking for information. If search engine sent me there, I read one or two lines then closed the window. No one spend time in a graveyard.

Understood perfectly and that's good to hear -- I mean,if THEYMOS has stated such solid reasons then it'll not do much harm -- I took out time to read for myself.

So why are a few peeps around so obsessed with a kinda traumatic facts that signatures be placed on ban?
Does that have anything to do with securing the reason for these platform - which is Bitcoin?
 I don't know how you guys manage drastic situations in your little world, not to talk about a forum. Is that the most important thing to do now, when we are still tryna evade some furious punches From Craig?

Like it or not -- if this man prevails, which for sure, I know he can't -- we're all gonna set out on out normal lives, leaving this place dead cus he won't dance to our tune. Isn't this the right time for us to do whatever we can to save our COAST??

Now if the whole scenerio looks funny to you, then fine. You're not worth being a part in the first place.

Sandra☹️

Fantastic, bitcointalk is one the richest forum in the world with almost 25 Million USD funds. the forum shared $7 each.

I haven't heard of any talk from Theymos about banning signature campaigns. AFAIK, he just said he will no longer host the weekly banner ad (on the top of the pages) slots auctions.

There's something I don't understand @NotATether.
Was there an initial ordeal made by Theymos in respect of banning signature campaigns lately?
Or are you're just coming up with it as a deterrent? To get spammers enclosed in a dry well?

That's not an argument. Lets allow that remain as a question to be answered.

Sandra 👩‍🦱

The forum is attractive now due to the traffic it pulls. Campaigns looking to get people talking about their project would consider advertising here, cause they are guaranteed to reach a large audience. If signature campaigns are removed, majority of that traffic would disappear over the coming weeks, greatly reducing how viable the forum is for running a spam campaign.
I've been on forums without the reach or traffic bitcointalk offers, and spam is barely a problem there.

100% might be a reach, but a huge chunk of spam would be cleared up without signature campaigns.

I wouldn't be so sure that removing signature campaigns would cause a total removal of spam. Keep in mind that's not the only way that someone can promote their service on the forum as there are also so called "bumping services". Some of those services (at least better ones) are not only writing exclusively in one thread, but they go around and do sort of guerrila marketing that could become quite popular if signature campaigns were removed.

You joined this forum to 5 year shitbump a Forkcoin topic. I don't think your "sponsorship" stands a chance.

I keep a list per hour, day and week.
You can't really use this to count users without paid signature, as many posts are from bounty spammers spamming Twitter links. Luckily, their forum rank is too low for a signature.
A better way to check is from Recent Posts: try to find a post that isn't bounty spam, and then see if they have a paid signature.

Forum funds is a good start.

quote from - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.60976136

this is my opinion in my eyes, First time I see that logo you look advertising bitcoin cash . Even different rotation degrees (bitcoin cash has 120° while clean energy use 60°)

Theymos has once or twice expressed that he's considered removing signature campaigns from the forum, but decided against it due to certain reasons. Here is one of such situations;

If signatures are ever removed, it would clear up 100% of the spam which goes on here, but would also reduce a number of active users contributing positively, or reduce how much time they spend on the forum.

Can you imagine how many members would no longer post here if theymos decided to remove signatures, thus ending signature campaigns. What would happen to the forum then? A huge proportion of members here are present because of the incentive (signature campaigns) therefore it would be interesting to see how such a scenario would play out.

Yes, it is highly unlikely theymos would ban signature campaigns but it is not impossible to do. As long as he decides taking a particular course of action is in the best interest of the forum, he will probably do it but thankfully he has not indicated anything negative towards signature campaigns as far as I am aware.

According to ninjastic space, ~9600 members wrote at least one post in the last month, and that includes all those altcoin bounty shitposters that are spamming their "proof of authentication" and other nonsense. Exclude them and what's left is maybe ~5000 members. Small number of active members I think, considering how many registered accounts are there. Increase threshold to let's say 10 posts a month (still low number), and total number of active accounts drops down by ~70%.


That's because none of the had an actual community built, like it was the case with bitcointalk.


Exactly for that reason there shouldn't be no fear that signature campaigns will be removed anytime soon, as everyone is well aware of the effect that would have on forum traffic.

Signature ads should be banned, not forum ads. Almost everyone talking on this forum do it only because they signed up to some dumb signature campaign, so they have to post something every day to earn their pennies. Reading this forum is a pain. Paid posts must end.

I just counted, and in all signature campaigns, paid in bitcoin around 415 members participate. I did not count the Stake campaign because I can't find the participants list and 1xbit for obvious reasons. Plus other campaigns where payment is in tokens, I believe there are about 1000 members in total who are paid for their activity here.
maybe Loycev or someone who deals with statistics can provide information on how many regularly active accounts there are out of 3.5 million registered while "only" 1000 paid for that.
 
in the end, several other forums tried paid to post and none of them survived.

Yeah especially with the deviation from POW to POS.

Many no longer understand that BTC was purely POW and now with LN it is a hybrid coin.

This is a complex issue yet to resolve itself but since LN started we no longer have huge block fees like 1btc or more. So to fully understand the shift in BTC basics and the deviation from fee structure all the older info needs to be intact.

I would like to be a sponsor...How much?

I also wanna add to what you said -- anything FAIR and uncompromising shouldn't be stopped unless yunno the better --
If I'm to add more specificity, that'll be -- except yunno of something esle you could do, that'll make interested users procure some bucks for themselves and also guarantee traffic at the same time -- then you can, as well make it an appraisal.

This place is just gonna be boring ASF!  I might still be posting but, how bout others?? I'm I gonna speak to myself?
If that's really bothering anyone, you could prolly use the said button. It's on everyone's profile.

Cheers
Sandra 👩‍🦱

The forum is not a charity. The forum is run in order to improve the chances of bitcoin succeeding over the long term, along with furthering the forums stated mission that loyce quoted above.

I am not surprised that forum suspended ad auctions. Given the obvious process of having to manually vet each new potential advertiser, and the low auction price in recent months, selling ads was likely not worth Theymos’ time for a long time.

I think part of the reason for the low ad prices is strict requirements to advertise, and the long list of things that Theymos won’t advertise. Plus, the forum doesn’t offer any kind of targeted advertising, which is something that advertisers are offered almost universally. The lack of targeting means more privacy for forum users, and that is the price the forum is clearly willing to pay in order to offer privacy.

Agreed--despite how much garbage a lot of people who wear them bring to the forum, those signature ads also incentivize the really good posters to post more often, which almost ensures that threads don't end up dead and that there's always some topic somewhere worth participating in. 

I mean, look at other crypto discussion forums (take your pick).  If you look at the first page, oftentimes the most recent post was from a day or even a month ago.  I'm afraid that if Theymos were to suddenly ban campaigns and bounties, bitcointalk would suffer a similar fate.  It might not, given how popular bitcoin is compared to even the hottest altcoin, but I can almost guarantee you traffic would drop off a cliff.

Besides, there's always the option to put signatures and avatars on ignore if you find them obnoxious.

The source is always better than the archive. Even in Bitcointalk's case where the forum migrated from bitcoin.org.


I do, but they are all notorious havens for the worst trolls society has to offer. Bitcointalk is unique b/c of the paid signature aspect. It increases activity at the expense of degrading quality of discussion.

Do you think that those who have a CM signature are the biggest problem on the forum? Of those fifty people who are in the campaign, maybe 50% would stop being active, maybe all of them would disappear with time, but maybe some who don't do it just for the sake of earning would stay.

In my opinion, the biggest threat is those bad signature managers and bunches of spammers that they employ to promote even an obviously proven scam. This is the only reason why the admin can ban signatures, and he has explicitly written that several times.


The problem is not in the number of signature campaigns, but in the fact that even now there are no quality members to fill what is now available. This only means that the criteria will be lowered even more, which consequently means more spam and shitposting.

After the forum ads has been suspended, I never think signature space will follow the same path. Actually that make projects which only promote on forum ads will consider move to signature campaign since there's no way for them to promote except it is. Maybe we will see few new campaign comes up in the next week or month.

I think @theymos want to offer a complete freedom, just like one feature that Bitcoin is offering.

Not seeing signatures is a great feature for those that are annoyed by them, but I think if you participate in a campaign you should not be able to enable that feature. Kind of a give and take approach. Just an opinion.

I am also 1 that feels that signatures will not be taken away since I feel that's what drives traffic to this place.

You don't need a working forum for that, just archiving would be enough.

The forum's mission is (almost) unique on the internet:
I don't know a single forum that offers the same level of freedom of speech as Bitcointalk.

Wow! Interesting. But I am not surprised.
Even though this is the main goal of Bitcointalk, It's created many opportunities for thousands of people to make money and live their lives. This forum won't make money from ads if theymos doesn't accept offers. So, This is now purely dedicated to Satoshi and his posts only. Also, Some great people like Hal Finney and Laszlo Hanyecz.

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@NotATether, What do you think about https://en.bitcoinwiki.org ?

I think its probably closer to 90% just going by how many posts have paid signatures underneath them. In theory sig campaigns should just be a bonus to people who were already posting anyway, and I think for some posters this still holds true. However, its pretty clear the vast majority are here just for the payday. This has led to an ingrained culture of shitposting-for-cash where genuine contribution is quickly buried beneath a flurry of dull, meaningless drivel. Most visitors who aren't already a member here aren't gonna wade through it to find the rare, interesting nuggets of information... they've effectively stopped coming here.

Similarweb Global Rank for Bitcointalk (taken from what is currently available and archived)

Sept 2022 - 35,390
Apr 2022 - 33,489
Jul 2020 - 24,833
Jul 2019 - 7,717
Jul 2018 - 2,671
Aug 2017 - 1,890
Feb 2016 - 7,762
Nov 2013 - 33,073

At the same time, there is no motivation to attract more traffic. As theymos recently explained, the forum is doing quite well financially. Bitcointalk really just has one purpose now and theymos has one job, and that is to make sure satoshi's posts remain accessible and in tact.

Actually I think that will be perfect to start with for now - websites that improve Bitcoin's image.

We should make a small list of banner websites (small, so that there isn't an overwhelming amount of banner ads) and those three will do perfect.

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I added a poll (but wasn't able to make it multi-option, sorry), so assume that Theymos has one banner spot he wants to allocate towards a nonprofit and vote accordingly.

Wouldn't look any different to me. 

If you go into your profile and click the Look and Layout Preferences, you'll see a list of adjustments you can make to the forum.  One of the options is Don't show users' signatures.  If you click that box, suddenly the forum signatures no longer exist.  It does make it a little more difficult to tell who is commenting on something because they have legitimate input vs those who are getting their quota in, but if the signatures are bothersome it's worth it.  Especially once you've built up a good ignore list. 

I am sure that more than 50% (maybe the percentage is even more dramatic) of the activity on the forum is due to paid signatures. even in spite of that, some DT members or those who had almost secured a place in a better-paid campaign have left the forum. just to imagine how different it would be without stimulation through signature campaigns.

why not an advertisement?
many services gained significant momentum by advertising here. on the other hand, if the ads here are a burden, I believe that there are many Telegram and Discord groups, where it is possible to discuss freely without advertisements.

I wonder how much participation around here would stop if this happened. Do you think the folks chiming in everywhere with chipmixer signatures would keep posting? How many DT1 members would suddenly disappear? What about people selling coins and other products in the goods section… Would there be anyone left to buy? It seems like this forum is heavily reliant upon signature campaigns at the moment. This is what we built… I wonder if we’ll see even more signature campaigns and paid posters as a result of no legitimate means of advertising here now.

It's not that WE need advertising, it's the fact that Theymos would obviously want it. Let's not forget that Bitcointalk is still technically a centralized business owned by Theymos — which is totally fine, and I heavily support him!

Yes, I believe we need advertisement because most of the local market traders do not know and do not aware of bitcoin. In my office, direct opposite a clothes and a provision seller ask me what is bitcoin because she saw it on the banner I sample on the street of my office. It was not only she that has asked me but many and I have explained to many as well.

And also for the forum. Let there be no restriction on signature and campaign posts. The restriction is making some boards redundant. Although I really do not know why the restriction was implemented. Well paying for ads slot is not too bad but not everyone who want to make advertisement have the amount, that is an another restriction on interested persons to add ads.

IMO altcoins board activity are declining because there's few signature campaign paid with Bitcoin is forbid to post on altcoins board. Most of bounties right now are social medias campaign, so banning signature doesn't really make huge difference on bounties section.

I'd say Bitcoin discussion and Beginner & Help are become the new spam sections since there's many pointless thread created everyday.

Good idea, especially for non-profit project like:
1. We are all Hodlonaut
2. https://bitcoincleanup.com
3. NotYourKeys.org - Community Contribution Avatar Campaign

The sites paying to get slots certainly need the advertising, that's why they pay for the slots.
Does the forum need the revenue from paid advertising, I'll normally have said yes, but considering theymos is considering shutting it down, then maybe not.

While paid ad slots may not be that necessary, the incentives from signature campaigns goes a long way to keep discussions alive on the forum. Many of the discussions are spam, but even genuine, constructive conversations would slow up if there were no signature campaigns.

Then we will see a huge decline of statistics ^{(posts, topics, replies, new users, merit, almost everything lol)} on the forum especially on the altcoin boards' where bounties are the most reasons why these newbies' registers.

We cannot deny it why the forum has this lively and a lot of discussion is because of these users who keep posting are those in paid signature campaigns.

My conclusion from post theymos wrote earlier is that he is tired of doing everything manually, and even non-profit website can turn out to be shady or scam.
He would still need to manage non-profit stuff so I don't think he is willing to continue doing that, unless some moderator can do this job.
I think that funds people invested in forum ads so far will now move to signature campaigns.

I am sure bitcoin.org won't e advertised here any time soon after they parted ways few years ago.
Not sure what will happen with other non-profit websites, but I would suggest adding Ninjastic website, BPIP website, or Loyce'v archiving website.
I support idea that bitcointalk should use some ad-network, or DT members could vote if ads should be allowed or not, problem is that DT system is currently not working correctly.

I don't think Theymos would actually ban signatures based on what they've said in the past. They've mentioned scrapping the ad space below threads and I think there was hope demand would drop before then or it'd be less effort to implement that system.

The first topics where he mentioned stopping with the ad slots were years ago and perhaps this is a time where users enrolled in signature campaigns can determine what's promotable and what's scam/worthless.

Signatures remain a quite good way to distribute crypto to newbies and enthusiasts and to keep traffic here. There's also the argument that people might ignore the slots after a while so inserting new ones after a break might make them more noticeable to users. I can't find statistics on ad clicks either.

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I wonder if we'll get some new factoids coming out though soon? I'd support a community based project on that too if we have things/need tor ank things worth advertising generated by forum members here.

No

Read what theymos talked about the reasons, not worth the time spent on it is there. To ban ads will not affect this forum traffic, but if signature is banned, there would be less traffic. Many people that supposed to be exposed to what bitcoin is properly will be unable to.

Signature campaign makes this forum to be lively too. Banning signature campaign is not possible because theymos will also consider others that are using it as an incentive.

Maybe signatures are to be banned next ? 

Forum banner ads are unobtrusive enough so I don't mind them, especially considering the amount of signature ads.

I'm happier without commercial ads on this site, but some pro-Bitcoin initiatives could really use a boost in terms of outreach. I don't see a problem with that, considering we have a big "Lastest Bitcoin Core version" banner at the top of the page pointing to bitcoincore.org.

Like, let's go back to my own site for example (sorry about that).

Greenpeace has one million dollars to play with for smashing Bitcoin mining, while resisters have to pay for advertising from their own pockets. It's very expensive, considering that there is basically no website income to offset the costs. The result is that the facts don't get the reach they deserve (whereas the misinformation does because it is bankrolled).

Do we really need ANY advertising? I for one would be more than happy for the forum to be ad free !

So I just read Theymos' post in the Auction board: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.60976136 but it's locked so nobody can comment there, and it wouldn't bode well to start a discussion there anyway since you can't delete or edit posts there.

So, ads are not going to be auctioned away anymore. He did mention that you can privately contact him to buy some ad slots from him in the usual manner.

Seeing as this frees up a bunch of ad slots, what does Theymos think of advertising non-profit bitcoin sites?

I was thinking in particular about websites like bitcoin.org and perhaps my own website bitcoincleanup.com. Of course, as a prerequisite you must already have an HTML banner designed.