Hi everyone,
As you have noticed, we have added a banner to the forum. Since FM started, I tried my best to keep banners out of the site. However, at the current stage, we have found it to be necessary.
The position and number of banners are not yet definite. What you are seeing is just a first trial. I made sure to keep 'viewtopic' free of banners. (The page with your thread and replies to it)
Thanks for your understanding and support.
All the best,
Fred
Oh dear. It has come to this. I loved FM for all these years while it was free of advertising, a haven on the web. However, I understand economics and business and can see how some amount of advertising might become a necessity. Thank you for all the years with no advertising!
I have no problem at all with the principle, and I also would like to thank to team to have managed without it until now, but can't you make them a little bit more discrete ?
Maybe it is a matter of size/color on a grey background, but I find them a bit too flashy compared to other sites. You don't have to follow my opinion of course, I also understand the constraints....
I suppose it had to happen given that FM has been ad free for so long. Still, the placement of the ad isn't bad and it doesn't show up within the thread which is a good thing.
Fred Miranda wrote:
As you have noticed, we have added a banner to the forum. Since FM started, I tried my best to keep banners out of the site. However, at the current stage, we have found it to be necessary.
The position and number of banners are not yet definite. What you are seeing is just a first trial. I made sure to keep 'viewtopic' free of banners. (The page with your thread and replies to it)
Have you also considered text ads (adwords comes to mind) and decided against them?
Fred,
you should do what timesquare did with starbucks...Starbucks has to use a Brown logo/store name for their store so it mixes in with the rest of the stores around instead of the "green & white"
can we get some gray & purple banners instead of BLUE.
I understand the laws of economics and the web. I thank you for many years of peace and quite while viewing photos.... but I do have to agree, if you could request banners that look complimentary to the FM tone, it would be nice. I was not very happy when I saw the blue Adorama banner for the first time this morning..... in fact my first thought was "Oh no...."
I would certainly be willing to pay more to avoid ads. Not sure how many would tho. Many would say the will pay more but not actually do it, so the population could decrease a lot.
Fred,
If it is unavoidale, I believe the majority of us here can put up with an add or two. However, in addition to the suggestion to keep the ad's color to match the overall color scheme of FM, I would also suggest to keep the ad to stricly related to photography, please. I certainly don't want to see C***s or V****a or other drugs ad, for example, to show up here, not that you would allow something like this to take place, of course...
Everyone,
I understand that is hard to get used to this. I'm having a very hard time myself...
Please understand that is very expensive for me to run this site. It has really grown into a huge community and as a photographer I promise that I will do everything I can to keep this as discreet as possible. I have already contacted them about adjusting the color scheme and I do think it was a good suggestion. Also, I'm going to try my best to stick with photography related advertisements. You may have notice that this year I have made a lot of improvements to the site's speed, reliability, code, features, etc...
None of this is free and people charge me a lot for the bandwidth and their services when working on programming. If I were a rich guy who could afford to do all of this on my own without ads, I would. In fact, I did as long as I could.
I really do not want this site to ever be a subscription only place and these banners hopefully will give me an opportunity to keep this site open to everyone.
By the way, none of the topic boards have the banner. (Like this page you reading)
Also, none of your photos will ever be presented with a banner on top. It's mainly on the portal type pages and it should not affect your experience here. It will just take some getting used to.
Please try to understand my position, and work with me on this transition.
All the best,
Fred
I know that as long as you keep it photography related, I won't have any issues with it. And if I were an advertiser, I _wouldn't_ want to blend in, as then the ad would be easily skipped over, so I'll understand if they stay conflicting colors.
And thanks for keeping the ads off the topic page (for now).
?