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

    • Thanks for the help guys! VWatchie I already found your thread but I'll check it again. Nice to know about acetone, I still have to get the shellac off since I made a little mess. I adjusted the jewel, put new shellac (the so called soldering technique, pallet tool too hot this time so the shellac "wire" melted in air before getting in contact with jewels or fork) rinsed the pallet fork and put it back dry. Amplitude is now in the 240-250 range that I expected in the first place. I guess there's enough oil in the escape wheel teeth already but I'll check that later. The mainspring was pretty beaten so a new one would probably boost the amplitude even further. Nice to learn new things. Now I have another thing to look for while disassembling. I wonder if the watch left the factory that way. 
    • Would be interesting to see it 🙂
    • These are all American movements (with the exception of the "Rubis"), and are all almost certainly "negative set" which means the stem is part of the case. So it's normal that they are all missing- they are with their cases. You will need male square bench keys to wind/disarm them. Vintagewatchstraps has a great writeup on the different systems. But basically, any American "x" size movement will fit any case for that size, possibly with some adjusting of the stem position. With Swiss movements, there is some interchangeability between calibers, usually within the same maker's range, but not really overall- there are thousands of different stems out there.
    • Hi, I'm very new to watchmaking and this is my first time posting here.  I've bought a lot of 10 vintage pocket watches size 0s from e-bay and just got them today.  Most of the balance wheels sprung quite freely and thus seemed like a worthy endeavor as a first batch for exploration.  I've just realized that none of them have any winding stems. Is there any way I could source appropriate winding stems for the movements? There seems to be assortments of various stems selling in bulk on aliexpress, but would any of them fit?  I've read on other threads that some people lathe their own stems (which is waaaay out of my current skill set, which is pretty much nil). Others say that you 'just have to try a few and see if they fit'. I would much appreciate any advice for this matter. Thanks!
    • Nice work.  In the last year, I have been servicing Accutron 218s.  I have the official Accutron hoder that provides electrical contact to the movement.  It is a pretty clever design.  There is a cut in the ring of the holder (shaped like a "C").  When in relaxed state, the holder is slightly smaller than the watch movement.  You spread the cut slightly and drop the movement in and release.  Very clean.  I have made 3D versions of this setup.  Have not explored using it generally for other movements.
×
×
  • Create New...