Over the past couple of days we’ve been having some pretty in depth conversations around the state of games journalism and gaming websites in general.
These conversations have come from 3 sides, crediting, reviews and advertising.
We’ll do this in reverse order over a couple of posts, since the last one is the easiest to tackle.
A few accusations have been labelled at us recently for flooding the website with adverts which is entirely untrue. We have the same amount of adverts now as we did 3 years ago and while you may not like the adverts they serve a very important purpose. Namely allowing me to actually pay everyone for their hard work and quality posts that appear on a daily basis.
If there was another valid option I would happily go for it but everyone knows that pay gates for smaller sites are impossible to implement and there is no other valid income generator. Also we can see when people use ad blockers and all that you are accomplishing is that I need to find new and more invasive ways to ensure that the advertisers actually get their product eye balled.
We endure a lot of criticism and blatant insults to try and provide you with the best possible service and news that we can, all we ask of you is to look at the few banner ads scattered around the site, is that so hard?
I often get approached to include interstitial adverts or pop ups and personally that is something I really hope we never see, but the cold hard truth is that advertisers need to see results and South Africans as a nation appear to be adverse to clicking on adverts for some obscure reason, which results in us having low CPC’s which leads to an amazing amount of time being wasted by me to ensure we keep moving forward.
All of this is pretty much my problem and I’m happy with that, I just wanted to point out that we haven’t added a ton of advertising spots over the last 2 years and we are entirely and completely powered by the income of advertising so please do us a favour and let your eye balls run over the ads while you are reading the stories or insulting our mothers in the comments.
Especially if you are one of the few who continuously berate us for not putting enough time into researching articles, it’s hard to allow someone to spend an entire day researching one post when we have a schedule that has to be completed and only so many people on hand.
As a side note, the competitions we run are generally done without any income coming our way and are simply a way for the local distributors to give back to the community so when we get complaints about a competition not being fair or good enough it annoys me quite immensely. We’ve given away thousands of Rand’s worth of prizes over the years and we continuously try new ideas and will continue to, if you don’t like the format or prize then there are better ways to let us know your feelings rather than making accusations or berating us about it.
That’s todays rant over, next up, reviews… hopefully it comes out tomorrow.
Last Updated: February 16, 2011
