Jump to content

Adsense and other ads on WRT


Mark

Recommended Posts

Testing using Adsense at the moment. 
the forum is currently costing me IRO £250/mth to run now and the last payment from eBay ads was £77 so as you can see it’s making a significant dent in my back pocket

you might ask why £250 when you can get cheap hosting accounts anywhere. Tried that last month. Disaster (you may have noticed performance issues and outages for a day or two).  Moved back to a cloud system. Currently we are at 50gig of user uploaded data  (images and such), this is backed up on Amazon cloud and Digital Ocean Cloud for failover and I have to pay for an 80 GB NVME SSD storage plan to get the performance we need.  and as well as that the system sends almost 50,000 email notifications per month - for this I have to use a separate transactional email service.  Bandwidth is not too bad as I use a lot of caching. 

but it all adds up unfortunately. 

I can’t afford to keep paying this every month. 

adsense has been a little encouraging. The past two days it made £4.50. So if that and eBay ads pan out then I will be able to comfortably continue with the project. 

I am also looking at making a theme for moderators and paying members where ads will not be served. Hopefully have this done in the next couple of days

  • Thanks 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

@Mark Just chipping in here - I'm a software engineer in my day job and I've worked on a few projects that touched billions of users.

To be fair, 250 doesn't seem too bad (but it obviously depends what you get out of it). It's hard to know without knowing the actual traffic patterns and usage, but here are a few suggestions that come from the top of my mind:

It would probably make sense to limit the upload size of media to this forum (especially videos) -> most can probably be uploaded to youtube and shared here via a link. This way you'd defer the storage cost to youtube for the small sacrifice of ergonomics (I'll let you judge if that's appropriate and something you'd consider)

Similarly with images, once they get uploaded to the forum, I would recommend trying to compress them somehow (using lossless compression could still save you ~20% of the original photo without sacrificing any quality). A common practice is to assign images a unique name based on their content and cache it for a very long time.

Regarding the email provider -> I would quickly compare the pricing, see if anything has changed since the last time it was setup. Most software as a service products have massive margins and often times just asking for a discount could be enough (or if you are comfortable commiting to a 1-2 year deal or something is always something that will make the sales folks very happy and make them offer that discount)

Last but not least, I would actually check how many of the 50k emails are being replied/opened. If majority of them are idle or inactive accounts, I would probably proceed and maybe send everyone an email with and honest email with a fair question of asking them if they still use their account and if they want to unsubscribe 🤷🏼‍♂️

As a quick question, regarding the 80GB SSD, is that because of the database size or is that separated? If that is so, it may make sense to clean/vacuum some database tables that have accumulated over time (session tables for example) and reclaim some disk space.
 

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I made sure to bump up a tier in my patreon subscription. Sorry to see that current algorithms and subs don't create conversions that scale long term. 

Maybe a little extra might help you develop things how you see fit. If a handful of us do the same hopefully it will ease your expense column a bit 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...

Hello Mark. I'm completely new to you, your site, and a complete novice as well. Not enrolled yet.

I like the content of your site and the friendliness of the members.

I ran a site of my own for many years and installed Adsense.

Members, be aware that Mark receives and income from the 'clicking' of the adverts. Be very careful about causing Mark a problem. Don't click every advert each time you visit. If there is something that may interest you, by all means 'click'. 

Adsense keep a record of 'Clicks'. Some of my members tried to help and give me more income. They 'clicked' every advert, every time a visit. Asdsense stopped my 'click' income for 3 month.

When it came back on, members did 'click' each visit, but limited 'clicks' allowed the income to grow.

Let's help Mark. 

I know the cost of running a site.

Regards to all

Keep well. keep safe

 

Ross

 

Edited by rossjackson01
grammar
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...
On 5/31/2021 at 5:56 AM, oldhippy said:

don't see ads as I use adblock plus for all my websites I use. 

if you don't see the advertisement does the advertisement company know that? If Mark has gone to all the trouble to try to get advertisement to keep the message board afloat does blocking the advertisements caused a problem?

  • Confused 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



  • Recently Browsing

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Topics

  • Posts

    • I recognize myself all too well. It takes a lot of experience and discipline to recognize when it's time to cancel and come back at a later time. Very well said! We should have a forum dedicated to this topic as it is critical to achieve success when working on watches. It's a lot more important than most other things related to watch repair. And yes, just a short break can make a world of difference!
    • Hello Wai and welcome to the forum. A little information to enlighten you a little more TZIllustratedGlossary.pdf
    • I am certainly not the first one who happen to ruin the chronograph center-wheel of a Seiko 6139B. The internet, when you search for it, is littered with stories, even here on WRT there are some. One of the problems is that the service manual of the 6139A is readily available on the net, not so with the service manual of the 6139B. On top, reading other forums & stories, there are people who claim that there is hardly any difference between the 6139A and the 6139B movement, so the 6139A service manual will suffice. However, one of the crucial differences is the design of the chronograph center-wheel. Also the Seiko reference numbers are different. For the 6139A, the reference number for the chronograph center-wheel is 888610 and for the 6139B: 888611 or 888612, depending on which manual you are reading (and perhaps there is a difference between these two wheel too !??) To lubricated the 6139A chronograph center-wheel, the following graphic picture in the 6139A service manual is given; One has to press down the sprocket and oil it. Unaware of the difference in chrono center-wheel design, I pressed down on the sprocket, but there was no movement. Perhaps not understanding or interpreting the drawing correctly, I pressed with the tweezers on the 4th wheel. This caused the 4th wheel, which turned out to be a press fit to the sprocket by the 6139B, to strip off the sprocket. Thereby me joining the line of all the others, who tried this before and are now searching for "how to fix" this misfortune. In an older thread on WRT, member @ricardopalamino place a picture in which he shows the difference in center-wheel design between the 6139A and the 6139B. To the left the 6139B and to the right the 6139A. As can be seen on the left center-wheel, the 4th wheel is pressed onto a sprocket. Pressing down on it, as shown in the 6139A service manual, gives a ruinous result. People did several attempts to repair the damage, but so far, I haven't found a success story. Here is one of the attempts; Reading what already has been tried, I tried a different approach ..... but sadly failed too. Nevertheless, I'll show what I've done; perhaps somebody may fine-tune or expand on the idea and has success? In my staking set was an anvil with a 4.5mm hole, exact the size needed to fit the chrono center-wheel "up-side-down". The distance between the clutch parts and the 4th wheel was 0.25mm. To support the 4th wheel as close as possible up to its center, I used feeler gauge blades, on one side a 0.25mm blade, and on the other side a combination of 0.15mm + 0.10mm blades. This allowed me to tap the sprocket back onto the 4th wheel ...... The thickness of 0.25 blades doesn't prevent some "spring" action, and so my 4th wheel was slightly deformed. The re-attachment seemed successful, but when trying to true the wheel, the connection failed again 😭 Currently there is a NOS 6139B chronograph center-wheel on eBay. Last Sunday the price was €150, on Monday the seller increased the price to €165 !!         Prevention is better than the cure and I do hope that anyone in the future, searching for a 6139 manual, with read my "Warning". As for my Seiko, I'm not going to invest €165 for one part and since the rest is pretty good, I will sell the watch for "parts or repair" 😞  
    • Off the top of my head I can't remember which was which, but one of the hands had the clutch with the very fine radial teeth as described above, the other had a flat disc with two tiny 'pins', there was what looked like the remains of something black smeared on the opposite face, maybe the remains of rotted rubber? When I can get some good pictures of both I will post
    • Hello and welcome from Leeds, England. 
×
×
  • Create New...