I have no problem with advertisements, but please don't allow Flash ads. I can't open more than 3 tabs of LinuxToday stories without Mozilla hosing itself on my dual PIII-550 (mostly a Linux Flash plugin issue being ridiculously CPU-intensive, but it still sucks).

Under these conditions, I'd be very ok with that.

As long as they arnt the ads from linux.com. Big Microsoft adds that take up the whole page and bog down throughput.

Please go on with the ads. This site has a lot of credibility; think of the ads as akin to a "sports sponsor" -- you know, those corps which pay to have their names on helmets, clothes, cars etc. in sports events.

You need the money, we need you to survive, those corp dudes need to look cool by sponsoring you. Everyone wins. I don't mind if Microsoft wants to put a photo of Bill Gates dancing and hugging penguins in the South Pole -- it's their money. But if others care so much about animations, why not a less graphical page option, like www.linuxhomepage.com has. Granted, I don't know how to do it, I'm just suggesting it... ;-)

I think it's a pretty good idea.

I think we have an agreement that flash adds suck. Also, having an uh, unoptimized flash plugin makes a bad thing even worse.

-Cameron

I say go for it. You have the right to try to support yourself.

As for my prefs, I'm fine with flash ads (though I don't prefer them), but I REALLY hate ads that make you want to have a siezure. As much as I love the content on this site, I will stop visiting if crazy, animated ads start showing up.
--
Hrothgar

It's a great site. Heck, if you just use the revenue to pay the bandwidth costs and buy yourself a few beers, that'd be OK too.

I find most ads very distracting. For that reason, I filter as much of them out as possible, via proxies like Junkbuster and Privoxy. Text ads like google's and k5's I find very much less intrusive and not nearly as distracting (but still not desirable). If you are going to place ads, please don't expect everyone to view them, and consider going all-text.

That said, I applaud your goal of furthering the quality of articles and documentation.

-molo

I think it would be nice to have an option on this page, kerneltrap.org asking whether you wnat ads or not. so you 'have a choice' as to whether you want to check out some ads or not. then see which ones get more hits...

thanks

Just make sure that they don't overlap the text, like some adds on Linux Today do with a small browser window.

Go ahead with the ads. It would be great if you could stay away from flash ads though.

Do it, if you need the extra revenue to maintain this wonderful site then do it. How about a members page too, without ads? osnews.com does it, though I don't know how successful it actually is.

Laters,
~Christopher X

Ads are fine, as long as they're not flash, and not massive, and not in the article body. Eg, an ad at the very top/bottom of the page is fine. Ads in the body of an article are VERY irritating, moreso if they're flash.

If ads are the price I must pay to see good content like this site, then it is a price I am willing to pay for. Big animated gifs or flash ads may be a price too high, but non-intrusive banners seem reasonable to me.

Just my 0.02$

Hi Jeremy, I'm okay with the ads. As you say, two text ads and a non-animated near the banner is pretty ok. Go ahead!

Here's what I think:

• Text ads (especially on-topic ones, such as what you see on, say, lwn.net or Google) are fine.
• Banner ads are more annoying; I think they're acceptable at the top of the page, but banner ads in the flow of an article, as has become common with some publications, aren't (i.e., they would take away from the experience of reading a Kerneltrap article so much that depending on the article in question, I wouldn't read it at all; ultimately, I think this kind of advertising would only lead to a loss of part of Kerneltrap's readership)
• The same goes for animated gifs, mngs and flash: too annoying and distracting.

--
schnee

So long as they aren't flash and preferably not animated.
And so long as they aren't too intrusive or distracting.

As for the reason you'd like ads, that's great, and I wish you all the best with it.

It seems that people are generally in favor of your success (and I concur). I would suggest that the Poll be changed to reflect your current questions.

What is the acceptable level of advertising on this site?
1) No adds
2) Text only adds
3) Banners at the top and bottom
4) Banners and animated gifs
5) Flash and animated gifs
6) all the above plus pop-ups that root your system

As long as you don't go nuts on the visual distraction, I'm ok with it. I'm used to seeing them, and your site is certainly valuable to me so I'd like to see it survive.

Thanks for asking, btw.

- Christian Convey

As the site grows in popularity, and the administrative portions of it scale beyond a one-person effort, it can become quite hard to do this, however I find more appealing adverts that actually are related to the topic/site I am reading. For instance, ADs for tropical vacations I find very annoying on tech sites. My favorite, as others have mentioned, are text adverts that are contextually appealing. Adverts that attempt to hi-jack my attention I view as "terrorist-style advertising" and are dealt with accordingly.

KernelTrap supplies excellent articles and community. Your desire to build on it and "reward" authors is commendable. The attention you have shown to this point assures me that what you do in the future will make this site even better.

With the motivation you gave this sounds like a great idea. Ads are fine with me as long as three requirments of mine are met. First, as has been mentioned by others, no flash ads. Secondly, animated ads that don't change/blink/flash annoyingly are fine, if the advertisers want it and it's not distracting give them what they want. Lastly, and I doubt you'd consider this but I have to mention it, don't give the ad control of the page, by which I mean, no interstitial, no sound, and no moving about the page.

Other than that, go ahead, I'm excited.

As a regular osnews reader, I'd say adds are alright.
Look at /. they have an animated gif or to and it's not too distracting. I think in order to get $ for the ads you'll have to allow at least animated gifs. As long as you maintain tasteful standards, it should be fine. You might even be able to do in-text adds like news.com does. I personally wouldn't mind if you did something like that, though, much smaller :)

Actually, non animated or flash ads that are on topic wouldn't be bad at all. I'm sure that most of us (myself not included, I'm in M$ Office hell) make our living using open source systems such as Linux or BSD. So products that relate to open source operating systems are good things for those people to know about.

As long as they don't eat up half of the screen...

I love ads!

I propose a thick, 10 deep, layer of interstitial pages before each story. Make sure they take up the entire screen and are pure Flash!

It's OK !

The following is what I wrote in a raving frenzy a few weeks ago:

I'm just fed up with people
advertising stuff the whole damn day, everywhere I watch. More than 50% what I
hear or see in a day, is commercial crap without any contents or meaning, one
way or another. On the radio, between tv movies every 5 minutes, in tv shows and
movies themselves, on t-shirts, sms, flyers, posters, newspapers, magazines,
wrappings, shops, the whole internet including my mailbox, cars, trams,
billboards all around town, even when I go to the bank to get some receipts I
have to wade to loads of inane crap to get to what I want.

I'm fed up with this overcommercial culture of crap where stuff is crammed down your throat and everything can be perverted for marketing purposes. It has filled this world like a virus, a plague. You can't hide anywhere anymore for the Marketeers of Death and their limitless whoring for more consumer money. I mean, I even see whole governments on the bandwagon.

On the other hand, however, if financial support is an urgent need for kerneltrap, who am I to disapprove of somebody else's finances?

I think it's safe to assume we all hate banners, to whatever degree. Obviously, text ads would be less obnoxious. But please don't joke about 'relevant commercials'. I don't think I have ever seen such an ad - it's a contradition, because if I would have a real need, I wouldn't have to be talked into a product, would I... If somebody needs to convince me (or at least *try* to convince me), I'm obviously not wanting the product or service in the first place. And I can bloody well educate myself about different and alternative choices (otherwise I wouldn't be on this site, would I).

So if your question is if I would like commercials, well... I think my answer is pretty clear. But my opinion must not be relevant in anybody else's decisions or visions, and you might have another opinion which equally deserves to be voiced. And in the end, it's not my site. Do as you wish.

Hey, everyone has to eat. If you
can get some sponsers and
make a few bucks, go for it.

Jeremy, I've heard of this feature elsewhere, and I think it might be a valuable one to consider: Have a feature that allows you to block an ad after you've seen it at least once. That way, if a particular ad bothers you, you don't need to see it ever again.

I know that on some sites, most ads don't bother me, but there's the occasional one that annoys the bejebus out of me, for whatever reason. I've seen it, I've parsed it, I'm not clicking on it, so all it's doing is generating ill will. Advertisers should be willing to let us opt-out of their particular ad after we've seen it, and still pay for the first impression. In fact, it should raise the value of each ad impression, since first impressions are the most important. An ad block on a specific ad is still an ACK that the person has seen the ad and was sufficiently moved by it to block it.

One downside to the specific per-ad block: In theory, a determined subscriber could block all the ads, and such determinism might be delivered with a script. To prevent that sort of abuse, I'd just simply re-enable the ad with the oldest block. i.e. require that at least one ad be enabled at all times. Alternately, set the threshold at a certain percentage--you can only block 75% of all ads, or something like that. That keeps an incentive to save one's blocks for ads that bother you most.

If you want to be really entrepenurial, you could sell the aggregate demographic information of what ads get most commonly blocked, but I suggest you make that demographic collection opt-in. I sense that KernelTrap's audience is a bit more privacy sensitive than Joe Sixpack.

With such a per-ad block system, you could offer Flash and/or animated ads, and let people essentially opt-out of them. The demographic feedback to advertisers will let them know their approaches are misguided, at least in this community. :-)

The thing I find most irritating with banner ads is when they are served from a slow site. Having to wait for them is really annoying. If you could make sure they are served as fast as the pages themselves I'm happy:) And I have no doubt you'll spend the money wisely.

Use the google ads. I dunno if you'll get sufficient revenue from them, but they're tasteful, non-intrusive and often useful.

-- b

But would still read the site if they were here. Issues I've seen are where an ad links to a third party site and they misbehaved; either large ads or their site down or slow or....

The motivation for paying authors I'm not really up for. Most people who have enough knowledge to write articles should do so for free. It gives them resume bullets, provides them a chance to develop their written communication skills, and lets them contribute. Since most of the people who really spend time in the kernel aren't making a living off their writing, why bother?

Either way, great site! I'll still visit even if there are ads. Now to just get my ISP to work with ECN.......

leitz

Since I use This Firebird Configuration I never see any adverts anyway :)

Google's AdWords system gives you very unobtrusive text-only adverts that are not only relevant to the page, but often interesting. Just an idea. I have no objection to seeing text adverts, and if they could be Google's (or something just as cool & relevant) then all the better.

Regards,
Rob

nothing wrong with ads as long as they keep the site running.