Ad-free Photo.net for paid subscribers?

[ken schwarz]

I've been happy to support photo.net with my paid subscription, but my loyalty is being tested with all of the

ads that clutter the site and slow performance. Have you explored the option of omitting ads for paid

subscribers? Maybe you would get more subscribers this way and photo.net would come out ahead. I want to see you

guys succeed in this new chapter of photo.net, but I am worried that you have lost your way.

[joshroot]

Ads pay for this site, that is the bottom line. Without that income, there would be no

programmers, no staff, no new features and no improvements.

 

Photo.net

went through a number of years where it had little in the way of

advertising revenue. Some of you might remember those years. They were

the ones where we had less than a single full time programmer, nobody in my

position answering email and fixing problems, and virtually nothing as

far as site upgrades or new features. Subscription money alone can't

make this site fly. There is a reason that we just recently moved off

of the outdated servers that were bought years and years ago.

[Matt Laur]

Not to ask you to lift your dress or anything, Josh, but it might help if you had a handy number you could trot out for threads like this... like, "such a subscription would cost $280 a year" etc. It really does help put things in perspective, since people have NO idea about the overhead in running a site like this, and probably don't know how helpful the ads really can be for the publisher.

 

I'll take a chance and say that you'll reduce the squawks if you can just get a couple of the syndicators to prop up some better infrastructure ... though I'm sure they also know they're losing money when their stuff times out. The problem is that people want to take it out on you, and not the people hosting the ads, even though that's where it seems (from where I'm sitting) that the bottlenecks are.

 

The good news - for me as a subscriber - is that lately I haven't been seeing as many (or even any?) really obnoxious ads. Something you or the syndicators have done has improved the QC on that front.

[joshroot]

<i>"but it might help if you had a handy number you could trot out for threads like this... like, "such a subscription would cost $280 a year" etc."</i>

<p>

I don't actually know that number. But I wouldn't guess that $280 would be that far off assuming that we stayed at the same number of subscribers. However, that wouldn't happen as many people wouldn't think it was worth it to pay that price just to avoid a few ads.

<p>

<i>"you'll reduce the squawks if you can just get a couple of the syndicators to prop up some better infrastructure"</i>

<p>

We're working on that. Believe me, if the adservers are causing problems for the users, they are causing trouble for me as well. It's not like I'm behind some firewall sitting next to the server boxes. I access the site just like everyone else does.

[JDMvW]

As I also said, there, in the last week I've been encountering more and more similar problems on other sites as

well. Outfits like eBay must be furious. I had to wait forever while some stupid ad manager diddled around in

order to log into PayPal.

 

In the great scheme of things, as important as this site is to our little "band of siblings" (to update Henry),

I'm guessing that the big internet vendors and so on are really going to get on to whatever is making this

happen. Could it be some sort of attack on adservers in general? Hardly seems possible, so maybe it's just some

200 billion of us all at once.

[tom l]

I think what bothers me is the ads on the home page are so dominant. The photo of the week is dwarfed by these ads. The vertical format of this week's photo is half the size of the ad below it. Seeing the same big add in the top right and bottom of the left of the window seems overkill. I understand the need to advertise but they should take second place to the content of the site, not the other way around.