Hello everyone! I would like to take this opportunity to discuss a rather serious matter that concerns the future of this site. As you know, we came close to closing down just one month after relaunching the site. That was because we exceeded our bandwidth quota of 20GB in the first month alone! In the end, we managed to secure a new agreement with our host that gave us 100GB of bandwidth at an affordable price. Phew! However, right now, we are approaching another bandwidth crisis. We are currently close to using up 100GB of bandwidth and it's only the 25th! At this rate, we will definitely break the 100GB limit by next month. Normally, we would be estatic to see so many people visiting us. Unfortunately, I have reached the point where I cannot personally finance any futher expansion of this site. As we are a fully independent hardware site, we rely entirely on advertising to keep us afloat. Sadly, we have not been able to even come close to covering our current costs. And this is all thanks to the prolific use of ad-blocking technology. Initially, we noted an advertising reach of only 11%, which means that only 11% of our visitors are actually viewing any banners at all. The remaining 89% are evidently using some form of ad-blocking software. You will note that I have mentioned this sad trend a couple of times here. I guess no one's really reading because our ad reach is getting worse as we get more visitors and use up more bandwidth! This month, our ad reach has plummeted to a low of 8%! That means 92% of our visitors are blocking our ads! I don't have to tell you that this is really an impossible situation for us. We cannot upgrade to a semi-dedicated solution (should we need more than 100GB) and neither do I have the financial resources to keep paying our hosting bills indefinitely. I have been thinking a lot about this problem and I have come to the following conclusions :- 1. Ad blocking is unacceptable. Like many hardware sites, Adrian's Rojak Pot relies on banners to stay afloat and stay FREE! We provide our reviews and articles for free. We are just asking for you to help us maintain the site by allowing banners to be displayed! 2. We should sit down and solve this problem once and for all so that I don't have to waste my time on such problems again. We should be concentrating on writing good reviews and guides, NOT worry about staying afloat! I know that many of you dislike banners. Frankly, I'm not too fond of them myself, especially those that pop-up or the persistent ones that won't go away until you click on them. However, I am fully aware of just how vital they are to our community. Without ads, there wouldn't be sites like Anandtech and HardOCP. Without ads, sites would have to charge visitors for access to material. Without ads, there wouldn't be so many sites online now! Let's face the fact - NOTHING is free. Someone's got to pay somewhere. In this case, we are paying for the bandwidth. Whenever you view a page on our site, we are paying for that. Whenever you click to view a bigger picture in our reviews, we are paying for that. But are we charging you for it? Nope. Nada. We are providing it all free of charge. What do we ask in return? Just to be able to display some ads so that our site can remain online. You have, in you, the power to make or break a site. Whenever you visit a site and allow banners to be displayed or when you click on a banner, you are essentially voting for the site to remain online. By refusing to allow banners to be displayed, you are actually voting the site out of existence. Because without the money derived from advertising, a site will have to charge for access or just close down. This is what Adrian's Rojak Pot is going through now. Right now, we are still getting support from the 8-9% of our visitors who have been extremely supportive of our work. Thanks to you, we have survived till today. But I feel it's time for the rest to show a little responsibility too. It's unfair for the minority to do all the "ad-viewing". Don't you think so? If you don't like our work, please feel free to continue blocking our ads. Hey... if you don't like our work, what are you doing on our site??? But if you feel that we have contributed something to the community and should continue our work, please vote for our existence by allowing banners to be displayed! I'm really tired of trying to stretch our bandwidth quota to the max each month. I really hope this last plea of mine falls on some sympathetic ears because if all fails, we will be forced to fall back on our last resort - <u>anti-ad-blocking</u>. Yes, I'm considering of restricting access to certain portions of the site to those who do not use ad-blocking software. This will allow us to cut down on the number of banners (currently four) on our site and yet remain afloat. This will allow everyone to surf Adrian's Rojak Pot with minimal interference from banners. You see, if everyone allows banners to be displayed, then we wouldn't need to put so many banners on this site! Logical, isn't it? Adrian's Rojak Pot can probably make do with just two banners IF everyone views ads. That will speed up page loading and reduce the clutter on our site. A WIN-WIN situation for everyone! But first, we would like your feedback. Right above this editorial is a poll we are running on the matter of advertising on Adrian's Rojak Pot. Please help us make the right decision by participating in the poll.
Your material is worth all the four banners currently being shown - I'll allow banners to be displayed. Just because I love the 'The Roti Canai Thread ' SO MUCH
Adrian, some suggestions, not sure how many you've tried though. 1. Ditch the popups. Most people I know who use ad-blockers, use it because of the popups. I personally dont, cause I dont mind, and I dont visit many sites which have lots of popups either. Yours only sends 1 popup, so its fine by me. Some people though, hate popups with an abandon. 2. Tried any affiliate programs, to get some funding? I use www.cj.com, so far getting just enough to break even in costs. Then again, my site isnt as high traffic as yours, so we dont use that much in bandwidth, so far only sub-20GB/month tops. 3. Not exactly a suggestion, but just to say you guys are one of the top notch bunch of people in the local scene. it would be really sad to see you guys go under. Keep up the good work, and all the best
Ok guys, bear with me thru this rather long post. While i'm not denying the fact that the site is actually very popular among users and does generate a fair amount of hits, using up 100gb of bandwith over a period of one month is not an easy task, even for a huge website. A rough calculation of 1000 hits per day for a whole month will mean that each hit is using up 3mb of bandwith. The is the equilvant of downloading 31000 mp3's over the space of a month! While this didn't hit me at first (i was rather shocked when you sent me a site update with a reference image), but your problem lies in the fact that you're not optimizing the use of your bandwith, and this is very and i mean very obvious in your images. Take for example this image on your main page. That image is 20k in size. Now take a look at this image This on the other hand is 7k in size. Do take into account that i converted that image from your jpeg and not from the original file which would have been even smaller. Now some simple math of 1000 visitors a day x 30 days x 13k = thats about 400kb gone just like that. And how about this That is about 55kb in size while... this is 15kb. Not much difference really right, unless you look "very" closely. Another quick calculation will tell that you loose 1.2Mb in bandwith a month just for that one picture. Your entire nf7s article had something like 20 pictures, so that makes 24Mb lost. This are all on an assumption that there are 1000 people visiting your site daily, which i think is not even anywhere near the hits you guys get. I guess most of us here understand the fact that bandwith these days isn't cheap and that there are always problems. But sometimes small things like this can go a long long way in solving your problems.I've got nothing against banners and i don't use any kind of anti ad software to block them, but i think by doing small things like this, you won't be in the kind of situation you are now. Well, hope this helps keep your costs down. I know myself the kind of problems you guys face, but i'm sure most of us here won't mind the slight reduction in image quality if it will help keep this site afloat. Hope it helps Note : i suck at math, sorry if there are any mistakes with the calculations
slightly offtopic, but relevant here IMO. by the way, se7en, i think the more precise term you should be using is 'pageview' and not 'hit'. AFAIK, a hit refers to one item being requested, i.e. a graphic or a webpage. thus, a webpage with 10 images would generate 11 hits (10 for the images, and 1 for the page requested). please do correct me if my understanding is wrong.
Wow! You guys don't sleep, do ya? Actually, we don't like the pop-up at all. In fact, I rejected all but this one because this is a targeted campaign. It alone makes up more than 80% of the total revenue this site gets. We don't have much of a choice. We are also with Commission Junction but how many people actually buy through us? Haven't made enough for them to even send one cheque yet! Hello se7en, Sad to say, our reviews are NOT the problem. Granted, the pictures are large in size. I will definitely have to work on them. But most of our bandwidth use is due to the BIOS Optimization Guide! To cover that, we actually paid for HTML compression which seemed to be doing something but evidently, not enough. The BOG currently covers 170 BIOS options so new visitors will read quite a few pages. I don't quite have the mental acuity to do any further calculations now (it's 3:15am!) but our stats show that most of our bandwidth are used up by visitors reading our BIOS Optimization Guide. That's why it's quite hard to stay within 100GB. We can try reducing the graphics size although we would like to be able to show people large pictures but this wouldn't help enough to solve our problems. And if we go beyond 100GB, we have to pay $5.50 per GB! Right now, we cannot even cover our 100GB hosting fees, much less pay for the extra $5.50/GB excess fee! Hence, this emergency editorial. If you guys (not just you two! ) think we are worthwhile keeping alive, please turn off that ad-blocker and allow us to serve some banners.
Incidentally, this is a good opportunity to see what everyone thinks about banners in general as well as intrusive banners like pop-ups. Especially what they would consider as the upper limit ARP should have. Oh yeah... forgot to mention that you DON'T have to register to vote! Just vote so we will know what your opinions are! But if you would like to comment, please feel free to do so! We appreciate all comments and suggestions!
I have been viewing your BIOS guides for aeons now and find them the best bar none. I agree totally with drab, it would be a very sad loss to the Net and to the tweaking community if this site went under. If it takes a few more banners to keep the site running, get them up. I never use pop-up stoppers or ad-blockers because I know they can help pay the bills and every once in a blue moon something will spike my interest. Although I must say I really hate pop-ups and pop-unders, whoever invented them needs a good hard kick in the crown jewels.
I say if banners is what you need to stay alive.. give me more banners. I have never used an ad blocker before and I don't intend to start. So I am with you Team ARP.
You don't really have to reduce the size of the graphics, just the quality of it. And with some of the current compresion options available, you save a lot of bandwith with barely visible image quality difference. As for the BOG, i seriously doubt 170 pages of text is using up 100GB of bandwith. A Linux NetAdmin bible with 554 pages of full text and graphics comes to about 4Mb on pdf. That would take a stagerring 12,000 downloads in a month to use up 50% of your bandwith. Anyway, are you guys really sure its the BOG that is eating up your bandwith? Does your host provide you with webstats and so on to actually show how much of bandwith is used up daily and on average, and so on? If yes, maybe going thru it will reveal more answers. One other option you could consider if the BOG is the actual culprit is to get a unlimited hosting elsewhere (but with rather limited disk space) and host your BOG there. I'm sure a 40MB hosting package will suffice for the BOG, and then you can revert back to a 20GB bandwith hosting for the rest of the site. Just my two cents worth Hope it helps. Honestly speaking from experience, banner advertising is really hopeless in countries like malaysia, unless you can get one of em local companies to agree to put a banner on your site. When it was still new, everybody clicked on banners out of curiosity, but now, almost everybody knows that it just takes you to some overseas site and in this country, purchasing online from local companies is already a big deal, purchasing from overseas companies is still quite far away.
hello se7en, well, the BOG although text only, does indeed eat up a lot of bandwidth... we have on the average about 7k unique visits per day...excluding refreshes and all.... and the BOG view page daily average hits is about 10k os lets say one BOG page .. inclusive bg image, top banner img etc.... but excluding banner ads is about 50kb in one day, 10000 x 50kb = 488MB goes to show BOG alone... so i think you can see where all our bandwidth goes even if HTML compression is in play, lets say 30% less (a lot already!) that still is about 341MB per day! but mind you this is only view BOG page.... and whenever Adrian updates the BOG... our hits spikes UP!!! our articles are not as popular as the BOG (although we hope so! ) so the images there don't really concern us.
As i mentioned i suck at math, but lets see.. At 500MB a day for BOG x 31 days a month = 15.5GB Thats about 15% of your allocated bandwith, only I really think you guys should check the logs or something, who knows there just might be some m0ron out there sitting on a DSL connection who has a grudge against you guys. All he has to do is open a offline site viewer and get it to download your entire site day in and day out - and that could easily be eating up all your bandwith. Check the logs, check the stats, from my experience, 100GB of bandwith is hard to use up especially on a site that doesn't offer any kind of huge downloads.
urm... i guess you are right... LOL... missed trying to times that by 31 days... but still, according to the logs, it seems that the bandwidth is all going to the BOG even if the calculations do not tally! sigh....
Adrian, I noticed the ads you guys serve are all from BurstNet. Do they actually pay a % for purchases made from clicks from the site? I usually just use Crucial and PCMods links from CJ, and we do occasionally get some large >USD100 purchases... which in turn net us some USD 10 or so in affiliate fees. Else, peaz's idea on blocking ads only on the BOG would be something to try out, IF it works. One other thing, how big is the BOG anyway? For all you know, your enti-leeching mechanism isnt working as well as you'd like. SOme bugger might be leeching the BOG multiple times over.
Hello Dirk, We don't intend to put out more banners. I think 4 banners is a little too many actually. Heh... In fact, I'm hoping to be able to cut it down. The problem is we have not been able to reach the level of ad reach where two of them would be sufficient. Right now, even four banners cannot cover our costs. As for Pop-Ups and other irritating forms of advertising, I totally agree with you. They should get kicked in the crown jewels. However, I find it funny when they say that such ads get a higher click-through rate. I'm not sure... I wouldn't click on them myself! Would you? Hello se7en, Actually, the graphics quality is my fault. Heh... I have this obsession with nice pictures. Back when ARP has unlimited bandwidth, I used to use JPEG quality level of 7 or 8 (in Photoshop) but now that we are paying for the bandwidth, I have reduced that to 5 (JPEG quality level). Currently, I'm playing around with a LARGER picture size but with a lower quality level of 3. I'm not sure how much degradation in quality we can accept. Understandably, it takes up a lot of bandwidth. But we want to maintain a certain standard of quality and we believe that nice, large pictures are as important in the review as the comments we write. As for unlimited hosting, heh... we did consider that. But after some digging, we found that unlimited = low bandwidth. It's true - NOTHING is free. We wouldn't be able to host the BOG there for long. Several of the hosts we contacted told us right away when we told them our expected use of 30GB that it would be impossible for them to do that on their "unlimited" accounts. We would have to go semi-dedicated! About advertising, well, that would be true if Adrian's Rojak Pot is dedicated to the local scene. However, most of our visitors are actually from the States, Europe, Australia, etc... So, the advertisements would be suitable for them. Also, these days, the ads are geographically targeted. So, you will generally only get ads about stuff that are targeted at your geographical area. Hmm... You may have a point about that. But I have asked GearHost to check for such kinds of leeching. According to them, nothing of this sort has happened. Our stats package are rather limited. It doesn't really tell the whole tale. Now... for the calculations... while we normally get about 7K unique visitors a day (this is a day where there's nothing going on), the number actually increases to 10K-14K whenever we post an update, i.e. the BOG. As for page views, the last BOG update alone took up way over 500,000 page views in just two days. So, 500,000 x 50KB = 25,000,000KB or 25GB! Let's say we follow peaz's 30% discount for HTML compression, that's still 17.5GB in two days! And we posted three BOG updates this month alone. At the minimum, that's 17.5GB x 3 = 52.5GB. Hello 8balls, Burst! is just an ad agency that only handles impressions, click-throughs and well... pop-ups. They do not operate like Commission Junction which pays for sales (a certain % off purchases). Of course, most of their ads... well, are virtually worthless. The only worthwhile ads are the targeted ad campaigns.
hehehe.. i dont mind banners!~>. i dont use ad-blockin software!~!.. ... ok.... put as many banners as you like..... but plz.... less on pop-ups & flash banners....... they are killing my system..............
Hello zy, These days, animated banners are a norm. But if there's excessive "animation" like flashing, etc... please let me know. I need to manually track those down and remove them. Also, many of the banners are geographically targeted. So, I would not be able to see most of them. If any of you have problems with any of the banners, please feel free to let me know. Thanks!
It's my opinion that no website should be trying to survive off banner ad revenue, and if you emply anti-ad blocking technology, you'll hurt yourself even more, because those people will just get their content somewhere else. Either start releasing your original content to subscribers or start selling text ads or something. Kuro5hin.org charges $10 for 10000 text ad impressions on their site. BBSpot.com charges $10 for a week of text ad rotation. Alienating your users by blocking them because they are blocking your $0.10CPM or $0.01CPC banner ads isn't going to keep you afloat.
