Distracting internet website ads

[admin]

 

Can admin clarify if they get paid for just allowing Google to show these adverts or only when someone actually clicks on one.

I suspect that in the vast majority of cases, they only get paid if someone clicks on them..

 

 

It's a combination of the two. For every advert displayed (referred to as an 'impression') advertisers pay a tiny amount, usually small fractions of a penny. When an advert is clicked, they pay out more, sometimes as much as a penny! The bulk of the advertising revenue on Shetlink comes from impressions though.

 

However, the banner ads on their own wouldn't cover running costs as we try to keep the banners to a minimum (and we don't use popups or allow gambling or adult content which are by far the biggest payers) - the shortfall is made up by donations and the 'high value' paid for classifieds categories such as accommodation for sale/rent.

 

 

Despite what everyone thinks, the internet is not free as someone, somewhere has to pay for it all.

It is indeed the case that 'the internet' has to be paid for at some point and there's only two main practical models that have emerged - advertising revenue and paid for subscription services, but advertising is the dominant model. Shetlink is quite an expensive website to run due to the storage requirements (for example, the database contains many 1000s of forum posts going back almost 9 years) and the bandwidth required to serve up many 1000s of page views each day.

 

 

However the "standard business model" of tracking us all around the 'net then bombarding us with targeted(?) advertising is wearisome at best and, a gross intrusion on our privacy at worst.

Whilst 'targeted' advertising can be a bit disconcerting (such as when an advert appears on one website related to content you've viewed on another website) it is perhaps not as 'big brother' as could be assumed. Targeted advertising happens because your browser stores information on your own computer about sites you've visited (in small files called 'cookies' that contain non-personally identifiable information), rather than the data being held on a central server somewhere. The ads are targeted by using the data held in the cookies.

 

If you're seeing targeted adverts on Shetlink it's because the sites you've visited have allowed the advertisers to have access to their cookies - Shetlink doesn't 'know' which sites you've visited and we have no information regarding who sees which adverts. And we don't collect much in the way of visitor data beyond some top level statistics - certainly nothing personal or identifiable. We're quite good like that

 

Cookies are generally helpful peerie fellows that enable some functions such as allowing you to be automatically logged in each time you visit a website, remembering which pages in the website you've visited, posts since your last visit to a forum, shopping cart functions, your Amazon Wishlist etc. You may have noticed in recent years that many websites will let you know that the website uses 'cookies' and you can elect to refuse them if you are concerned about privacy. You can see which cookies are stored by your browser, and delete or refuse them, in the preferences/settings of your browser.

 

Shetlink's policy on cookies is in the T&Cs.

 

 

To cut a long story short, the admin team are grateful for visitors accepting the necessity of adverts - it's the most straightforward (and free!) way to support Shetlink.