Poll: should blender's sites have ads?

Anyone else think the blender satelite sites should have ads? Being very visited sites it would be a good way to raise money for the development of the software.

Provided that the ads only consists of appropriate and CG related contents I don’t see how it would be a problem for the users. On the contrary, ads only would support the development of our favourite software.
(At least it would make me visit the sites more often :p)

So anyone else agreeing the blender satelite sites would have a great benefit in having (appropriate) ads?

As long as they aren’t intrusive.

The BF already has revenue generators such as the Blender Cloud and the Development Fund, both sources giving them far more than anything they would make from ads (which would be a pittance in comparison).

So in short, no, because it’s unlikely it would make any difference in terms of paid development.

Yes - More money for Blender development is a good thing.

Among tech-savvy users, 99% would get adblocked anyway. So there’s no point bothering.

I wouldn’t mind it a bit but consider this:

In order for ads to make real money you have to have someone sell those ads (just slapping Google AdSense on there won’t do much in terms of revenue).
So you need people actually selling those ads. (The job is called “key account manager.”)
I’m not a position to judge if this is worth it or not, just pointing it out.

Yes, would fully support non-intrusive ads.

Add a notice asking to whitelist the site, simple. I’d have not problem doing so to show support.

Neither would I

but you have to remember,

take a good look at these

See any ads?

Yup,
I think there’s a reason for that.

First of all, let’s sort out what you’re defining as a “satellite site” here. I’m assuming you mean sites like code.blender.org and developer.blender.org and the wiki, but please correct me if you mean something else when you say “satellite”.

Now, to the main issue, there are some serious considerations that need to be… um… considered before going down the road of including ads. Quite a few have already been mentioned. I’ll try to keep the list brief:

  • Blender already receives funding from the dev fund and cloud. Ads may appear as an unnecessary over-reach.
  • Blender’s audience tends to be tech savvy and prone to blocking ads, so an additional nag notifier would be required on the sites with ads.
  • Year over year, revenue generated by ads has been diminishing. They are certainly not as lucrative as they once were.
  • Poorly managed ad networks provide an attack vector for malware. This means that including ads is not a ‘plug it in and forget’ thing. There’s an additional maintenance cost.
  • Audience leakage. Ads provide an opportunity for site visitors to distracted and leave the page. For informational pages like the developer blog and the wiki, this definitely not a desirable thing.

So for these reasons, I’m not sure including ads would be all that great of an idea.

i remember andrew price mentioning several times that he tried using ads at some point and got so little revenue he dropped it. i think since blender doesn’t have marketing wizards at its’ disposal right now (but rather coding wizards), it too would not get that much revenue to justifiy the move.

“Audience leakage.” Wonderfully descriptive phrase. :smiley:

I wouldn’t worry about audience leakage. If your attention span is so short that when you see a colorful ad you forget to download Blender, then you’re not fit for CG work anyway :stuck_out_tongue: