Underline, FLASHING. Annoying, epileptic-fit flashing. Really gave this place a touch of class.

I win those things all the time.

Really, I'm having trouble finding a place to store all my loose cash.

What a bother.

I won 6 of those yesterday in my pyjamas

hoagie, you may already be a winner! why, I just got an urgent e-mail about the demise of my long-lost cousin melvin in nigeria. $47 millions is just an e-mail away :lol:

Look folks, it says "As seen on TV."  To me, that makes it much more legitimate than anything merely web-oriented.  In fact, I believe it right away.  Why? Because my TV screen is larger than my computer screen - it simply HAS to be more reliable.

I use Firefox and AdBlock, and never see any banners.  :-)

I use Mozilla-Firefox too and I have the banners set here to view because I get to see new products that way. I don't bother checking the new releases because I keep forgetting too. 

However, if I'm going to keep seeing banners unrelated to this site, I will block them.

Quote - heh....

Darn!!!! If that was a can opener, I'd have been sold!!!  LOL

wait a minute... i thought i won em all yesterday....darn it!

There's so many off topic banners now i don't bother looking at them anymore.

you can turn Rosity banners off?  mwuahahahaha..;)

"There's so many off topic banners now i don't bother looking at them anymore." - so this is the reason why my banner ratio has dropped from 1:35 to 1:200!!!

If everyone thinks like you and does not look to the legitimate banners also , I think this new policy got a lot of merchant advertising killed...

Quote - I use Firefox and AdBlock, and never see any banners.  :-)

I do too and I never see any banners. It's so nice not having to look at any of them. If I want to see what's new, I'll go to the Market Place.

i usualy checked the banner from merchants ...now all thos crappy fake win a million stuff banner i dont check any of them anymore...

and when you do click a crappy banner the site linked to it will put some nice trackware cookie on your system..nice going  dont ya think....

but these shitty banners will be in the TOS ... someway or another..

Chris

Not to forget that there are (at least) two meaning to the word "banner"..

1 - a flag, a poster, a strip of cloth flying in the wind, an advertisement (occasionally towed behind an aircraft)...

1. Someone or something who bans you from doing something EG, a bouncer at a club: "No, you can't come in! (unless you slip me a little something, of course)"..

Cheers,
Diolma

Up until a few days ago, I actually glanced at the banners to see what's new in the Market. Sometimes I even clicked on one. Now I can use the same self-censoring behavior I use everywhere else, and just ignore them. It's always nice to see that a company like R'osity respects carrying on traditions. First, the buck. Or rather, the potential buck, since I have never met a human person who actually clicked on one of those banners, which is what it takes to make any money on them.

Merchants screwed again, you lucky devils. Did your contract promise you anything about the banners except that they would cost you? Read more carefully next time....

M

Looks like Rosity is actually going to the dogs. I know I don't enjoy coming here like I use to.

I think I now have all of the non-poser related banners blocked. As they've been showing up I've been blocking them.

However, if they keep showing up, I'll block all of the ads for this site.  The main Poser stores are the only ones that I allow banners to show, but that might change.

Well due to the number of increasing non renderosity related banners I've stopped paying attention to them a while ago. Once in a while my eyes still falls on a banner, but it's getting less and less.

I'm pretty sure due to this new allow all banner policy, a lot of customers have been lost already.

But then in the end I lost faith in the renderosity staff already, I don't visit this place as much as I did. They promised to do something about the Hot20 when the new website would be in place. They sure did get rid of the Hot20, replacing it with a new popularity contest. After that I just figured this place is never going to change for the better and will only go down the drain.

The banner are just one more degenerating step.

Quote - I use Firefox and AdBlock, and never see any banners.  :-)

And my follow-up question is this: as more people get frustrated by these off-topic banners and block them all, how else can merchants advertise their products? Merchants can't talk about their own products in the forums (or else their posts will be labeled "commercial" and moved to the Product Showcase Forum).
 
One of the few remaining benefits of having an exclusive product here is that the merchant gets to run a banner ad for the exclusive product. If people are blocking the banners, what good is this benefit?

if they see a drop in their merchants' sales, and can attribute it to the off-topic banners, then maybe they could have a second banner on the bottom of the page for pub clearing house and others of that ilk. it's not like pub clearing house (or any of the others) is gonna know the banner's on the bottom.

Quote - if they see a drop in their merchants' sales, and can attribute it to the off-topic banners, then maybe they could have a second banner on the bottom of the page for pub clearing house and others of that ilk. it's not like pub clearing house (or any of the others) is gonna know the banner's on the bottom.

If I remember the rules from my days with LinkExchange (I quit when MS bought them), the banner owner CAN tell where the banner is positioned. Putting it at the "bottom" (whatever that is on a web page) is against the rules. And R'osity doesn't care about the merchants' sales, they care about how much revenue they generate. If crappy banners bring in more than merchants, the merchants are SOL. I don't buy R'osity Exclusives, by the way, and I only spend money on R'osity stuff if it's listed at CP. I know that still generates some revenue for R'osity, but my conscience is mollified.

M

Quote - > Quote - I use Firefox and AdBlock, and never see any banners.  :-)

And my follow-up question is this: as more people get frustrated by these off-topic banners and block them all, how else can merchants advertise their products? Merchants can't talk about their own products in the forums (or else their posts will be labeled "commercial" and moved to the Product Showcase Forum).
 
One of the few remaining benefits of having an exclusive product here is that the merchant gets to run a banner ad for the exclusive product. If people are blocking the banners, what good is this benefit?

That's something you guys will have to take up with Renderosity.

I love to look at the Poser banners.  Many of the items I've purchased have been because I saw a banner for it and clicked on it.  I've even discovered link errors in banners going to the wrong store or item and have notified Renderosity of the problem for them to fix.   But... Renderosity seems to becoming just another website with the usual banner spam.  So far I've been able to block out the ones I don't want to see, but I will block the entire Iframe if it becomes a nuisance to me.

Greed is a terrible thing to waste....
M

Just to let you guys know, the marketing team is looking into this, as we don't really want to be in a position where people are afraid to click on banners for fear of pop-ups and spyware.
In the meantime, if anyone wins a million quid, please let me know and I'll be happy to take care of it for you :biggrin:

I dealt with things like these long ago by editing my hosts file, getting Opera and turning off gif animations etc. Flashing banners? what's that? :biggrin: on an off-top note: Karen, that's an awful LOT of money saved! Now if I could only start smoking so that I can quit and save on it :lol:

Did anyone see that orange banner for Cable? I tried to adblock it but couldn't. It was 2 deep and embedded. For me to block it I would have had to block the whole frame, which would have blocked all banners from showing.

Quote - Did anyone see that orange banner for Cable? I tried to adblock it but couldn't. It was 2 deep and embedded. For me to block it I would have had to block the whole frame, which would have blocked all banners from showing.

Seems like someone is working very hard to try to keep us from blocking ads instead of working on making the site run smoothly without hanging at times.

Seems like someone is working very hard to try to keep us from blocking ads instead of working on making the site run smoothly without hanging at times.

Obviously.... the ads bring money, a smooth working site costs money.  But I do agree with you, visiting R'dosity still isn very unpleasant at times and has hickups and extreme slowness.

I'm not sure if the cost-benefit analysis points to continuing the OT banners. for example, what if they get 5 cents american per click, compared to a dollar or two per click on a merchant banner (assuming a known percentage of clicks results in a sale)? they might actually be losing money if the OT banners swamp the merchants' banners.

I haven't seen any of the types of ads that some of you are describing, just normal merchant ads and some ads for 3D related software (e-frontier, etc). Is there a possibility that some of these ads could be a result of adware on peoples computers? I remember some people complaining about popups here and an Ad-Aware scan made them go away.

Quote - Seems like someone is working very hard to try to keep us from blocking ads instead of working on making the site run smoothly without hanging at times.

I hardly think that for the amount of free features Renderosity gives people, you have any right to complain that they are trying to keep you from blocking the ads that help finance the site. Bandwidth for things like gallery hosting, forums, blogs, homepage space, etc costs money. A small 468x60 banner taking up a fraction of the webpage isnt  the end of the world.

Quote - I haven't seen any of the types of ads that some of you are describing, just normal merchant ads and some ads for 3D related software (e-frontier, etc). Is there a possibility that some of these ads could be a result of adware on peoples computers? I remember some people complaining about popups here and an Ad-Aware scan made them go away.

No, these aren't popups.  They appear in the same IFrame as the merchant banners and are banners, not popup ads.  In addition to that I use Mozilla-Firefox and between that and my firewall I get very few spyware/adware deposited on my computer. Maybe 4 files in a month.

Those shitty banners are taking away views from legitimate merchant banners, something that we all pay Renderosity 50% of our sales to have. Since the so-called upgrade a few months ago this site has been slower than ever, and still hangs regularly while pages load. It's nice to see that genuine concerns of long-time members and merchants really do get listened to.

Quote - Just to let you guys know, the marketing team is looking into this, as we don't really want to be in a position where people are afraid to click on banners for fear of pop-ups and spyware.

Thank you for looking into this. But, I have to ask: how do these banners get approved in the first place? Why do the admins "look into" these banners only AFTER someone has mentioned them? How many times have people mentioned the completely-inappropriate "smiley" banner ads? Yet other people report seeing it again, months later.

Quote - I hardly think that for the amount of free features Renderosity gives people, you have any right to complain that they are trying to keep you from blocking the ads that help finance the site.

I agree that the solution is not to block the banners: this punishes the merchants who run banner ads. I think that purchasing products at Renderosity would bring the site more money than a banner-click payment from someone like Publishers Clearinghouse.

On the other hand, if Renderosity can charge Publishers Clearinghouse $100 for a banner run (as an example), this could be more money than they could make on a $15 exclusive "wood furniture pack". In this case, it would be financally smarter to get the $100 fee instead of relying on a visitor clicking on the banner and purchasing the "wood furniture pack".
But, even though this may be financially smarter, how much does it cost in reputation, as more merchant banners are replaced by paying, corporate "spam" banners (as other people put it).

Well, apparently Rendersoity isn't making enough money from their own marketplace here, so they decided to do outside ads. :)

Well, apparently Rendersoity isn't making enough money from their own
marketplace here, so they decided to do outside ads. :)
Uh, "enough money"? What a bizarre concept. Bill Gates is not making "enough" money. :)

Let's just skip the "poor R'osity, they do all this stuff and barely make ends meet" hymn and pretend we all hummed along. A mall is "free," and I don't hear anyone tossing blessings at the management for their charity and civic spirit. They built the mall to take your money, and if you want to thank them for taking it, they have a handful of trained spokesmodels lined up who will say, as needed, "Oh my, we are happy to do it. It's our duty as good citizens."

M

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2659734

My understanding is that the banner space is sold to an "agency" which provide the ads, rather than us approving individual banners. Lillian has previously blacklisted several ads which were undesirable (e.g. those flaming smiley central ads which annoy me everywhere else) and will respond to concerns raised by members.

I would assume that if we get a significant number of unacceptable banners from one "agency" then we would cease doing business with them, but of course that again would be an admin decision. (I think this may have already happened once, last year - but I'm not sure.)

Lillian has posted in the thread at the attached link, if you want to ask her for more details :-)

Yeah well, those poxy smiley ads are still infecting the site on a daily basis. I'd love to see how many hits they're getting from here. I'm betting it's close to zero.

Sorry, but it's not a question of "undesirable" ads, by which R'osity generally means sex displays that do not increase revenue. And I'm willing to bet that "outside ads for 2 years" is a bit of a quibble, in that the "outside ads" previously were for Poser-related companies. I'd like to hear some examples of "outside ads" run two years ago that weren't. I won't be holding my breath.

I had to see that irritating Verizon ad, which uses very cognitive gimmick in the book to force you to notice it, on three different sites yesterday in about two hours. Here it ran at least twice in an hour. That constitutes abusing your customer base. I'm planning to cancel my Verizon service when it expires, and I'll mention that ad. The fact that it runs here, and runs repeatedly, tars R'osity with the same brush: customer abusers. As far as I'm concerned, it's as "undesirable" as samples of the local sex show offerings in the mall center. And it's as likely to disappear as we are to see R'osity endorsing the Minimum Wage.

I appreciate the fact that R'osity is free, and the trend continues, it's worth every penny. BTW,  your programmers can try to prevent me from blocking ads all they want. I have the best ad-blocker around -- discipline. Code around that.

M

ok lets clarify a point.

it's not the Rendo programmers trying to stop you blocking the ads.

it's the Advertisers programmers.
and they can be blocked wihtout blocking banners from Rendo.

note the server they are using and block that. eg: in my Adblock I've got :
http://adserving.budsinc.com/*  - that blocks everything from that server....

RubiconDigital - the Smiley Central ads were blocked last year. If you see any, please could you screenshot the page and post it in the Community Centre. They definitely shouldn't be running.

and if Smiley Central changed their adress or deal with the adserver (which lillan has clarified the only control she has over is to block ads. she has no idea at all what they are serving up) they'll be back. and again and again.

Those smilies have been running for months Karen. Everyone should know that.

I think it would be interesting to try a bit of an experiment with the outside banners. For the moment, they are all turned off.

Let's see if there is any difference in click-through rates during the next week.

One of the biggest contributing factors to the isolated cases of a decline in click-through rates is most likely the number of members that block all banner ads, which started happening prior to us allowing outside, general advertisers. However, I'm game to see what the response will be.

As a side note, 70% of our ad space is reserved for our vendors. The other 30% is open to outside advertisers. This is a policy that has been in place for several years. While we would like to keep the focus of such advertising narrowly focused on graphic arts products, they are not the only advertisers that may come to us. As you have seen, if we find ads to be objectionable, we do remove them.

We want everyone's experience here to be as positive as possible...even when it comes to such things as...YIKES...advertising ;-)

Thanks for all your feedback!

(PS. I blocked the smilie ads quite some time ago. However, they reared their ugly little heads through the new service that I stopped on Sunday. Should be the end of those guys around here. If you see any more of them...I didn't do it! ;-)

What distresses me is that I come in here to read this post about people bitching about the banners that show up and I see banners at the bottom of messages that are marketing products and websites.

It hurts my eyes to have to look at them. Take them off please.

I'm showing some sarcasm here of course but there is an argument to be made.

Shouldn't the banners at the bottom of forum posts only be there if they "ARE NOT" advertising something?

I could care less really. I don't read ANY banners. I just thought it was funny that some of the people that are so concerned have these (what could be considered inappropriate) banners. It's actually pretty poetic. LOL :)

dart, I'm not seeing any of those ads at the bottom of messages. block signatures in your options if they're annoying. but I reckon it's a good point - complaining about an offensive or intrusive banner, then doing the same thing in one's sigfile.

Hi Miss Nancy,

Thanks for the tip on blocking signatures. I didn't know you could do that.

Quote - On the other hand, if Renderosity can charge Publishers Clearinghouse $100 for a banner run (as an example), this could be more money than they could make on a $15 exclusive "wood furniture pack". In this case, it would be financally smarter to get the $100 fee instead of relying on a visitor clicking on the banner and purchasing the "wood furniture pack".
But, even though this may be financially smarter, how much does it cost in reputation, as more merchant banners are replaced by paying, corporate "spam" banners (as other people put it).

which (in my line of reasoning anyway) is a strong argument for renderosity finally starting to filter its product submissions a little. perhaps if most products in the MP were more marketable then they wouldnt need to outsource banner ads. noone will buy a "high-res morphing paper towel holder for poser" no matter how many banner ads it has.

(i just wrote a massive rant on this but i realise that it belongs in its own little thread so im cutting that part out and posting it in the merchant forum instead.)

As I stated before, I block all ads so I don't see any. I come here to read messages , check the market place, and the galleries. I hate things that move which detracts from that so, anything that moves of flashes, be it banners or avitars, I block them. Flashing things get on my nerves especially when I'm trying to read.