The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Oh! I see where you're coming from now. This is different from what Matt's been wanting.

You're saying that the user can elect to go to the ad on their own rather than it just being popped on them. Hmmmm....

Now, that is definitely intriguing. Wouldn't be too hard to implement since I already have the code in place for ad-free viewing of a set number of pages until they're used up. And I think upping the stakes to where the user is considered a premium member during those page views wouldn't be overly difficult.

The toughest part would be finding advertisers who want to be part of that. Ad agencies don't want you incentivizing people to click their ads (nothing wrong with incentivizing them to click our own, though, which at least gets some people looking at the banner area to see if the "Lucky" one came up) so it's possibly a tough sell with the agencies.

Although, perhaps as a different angle into popup ads? Click the link, get a popup, and get the next 100 page views as a premium member? Offer good once per ad per user per day. Well, maybe not with the pops. I haven't seen any pops that would be effective "commercials" this way. And the ones I've seen also don't pay well enough to make it worthwhile financially.

I'll do some digging. What's ideal is a broadband 15-second commercial that's both interesting to watch and pays the website well. If I had the bandwidth, I'd gladly watch an interesting commercial for 15 seconds to get most of the rest of my page-views for the day as a premium member. Especially a Mercedes commercial, and I'm guessing our demographic matches up with their target audience.