On Advertising

We don’t talk much about the site because we don’t think it’s all that interesting how we make the sausage.  We watch movies, we write down who’s in them, and we lather, rinse and repeat.  We’ve been doing it since 1999; hey! we’re 15 years old this year!  For some of that time, we’ve relied on banners and purchases thru the “Buy this Movie” links to help keep the lights on.  But, DVD sales are diminishing, the web stuff we do list is converting OK but not great, and the banner advertisers are slowing down, so we took a look at what we could do.

We could add more ad zones to the pages, but we didn’t want to clutter things up; we like our minimalist look.  (We’ve had it forever!)

Then, one of our advertisers approached us about piloting silent pop-unders — they had to be silent or we didn’t want them — and we agreed to give it a try.

So, from today thru May 4 (and possibly beyond) our ad network partner, GrandSlamMedia, is showing pop-unders on our site at a rate of approximately 1 popunder for every 24 pageviews.

We know the last time we tried non-banner advertising (the chat windows) it was met with mixed reactions, and we expect the same here.

We also know that ad blocking software exists, and if these sort of advertisements really really upset you, you might want to look into that sort of thing.  We ask that you don’t, obviously, as we get paid by the impression (each time they show an ad, we get a tiny tiny bit of money; but eventually those tiny tiny bits add up) but if you do, we understand… maybe we’ll find that there’s a market for an ad-free version of the site; tho such a thing would require us to build an infrastructure to handle users and passwords and password resetting and lots of potential customer service issues… but who knows.  We know that the time has come for us to grow and mutate and make changes and I’ve been busy programming trying to roll out new tools for our editors, and different table layouts in the database and all kinds of things, so thanks for sticking around.