Advertising would be fine if it was text only and neatly integrated into the main scream of posts for a thread. A bit like a Twitter promoted tweet.
And assuming of course that the advert is highly relevant – in which case it can actually be of benefit and be valuable content in its own right.
This of course requires investment in the technology to integrate the advertising nicely, plus developing relationships with the right advertisers.
But we definitely don’t want a mess of banner ads all over the site…
People with an interest in European GA and active on the internet will find EuroGA.
It’s surprising how often EuroGA shows up in the Google search results when looking for something aviation related on the internet.
I’m very happy there’s no advertising on EuroGA.
another vote for keeping Euroga ads free
We don’t want adverts on EuroGA (we get contacted all the time with proposals) because it causes all kinds of ethical problems.
For example recently one well known UK firm obliquely threatened legal action over a posting (which I know was truthful) and then what the hell do you do when they are an advertiser? It undermines the site because nothing negative can be posted, and people will suspect that such posts are being silently deleted.
Also, pragmatically, EuroGA is way too small for adverts to make useful money.
We already allow commercial content. In the Guidelines it does show how businesses can participate here, and we encourage that because it enhances the value of the site to everyone. If they get business out of their participation, that’s great. But this is allowed only if the participation is generally informative. What you get on other sites is generally a business tossing in a very brief post, which shows they “know something” and is just long enough to present the business name. That sort of stuff would get deleted here.
I don’t think anyone would positively “want” adverts on here if we can not have them. I was just saying that they could be implemented with very little (if any) negative impact. In the “conflict of interest” scenario you would just close the advertisers account and refund as necessary.
Everyone will say “we don’t want adverts” but everything costs time and/or money to operate. If the operation is sustainable long term with no revenues, then great.
The original context was introducing advertising or revenue to facilitate further promotion of the site. I agree that people should find EuroGA on their own easily enough. Any reasonably inquisitive or serious or keen-to-learn pilot should find it when Googling most subjects that they might be looking to learn about.
Driving a larger user base might just lower the quality of the contributions anyway – lower signal-to-noise ratio – so I personally don’t see that building greater awareness of the site needs to an objective in own right. It’s fine as it is.
IMHO a scheme whereby you essentially “mutually link” with outside firms is worth doing only if your own site has poor SEO.
Thanks to David’s expertise in this area, EuroGA has very good SEO and thus comes up highly in GA related google searches.
Driving a larger user base might just lower the quality of the contributions anyway – lower signal-to-noise ratio
I agree, but I am sure there are many pilots out there who are unaware of EuroGA.
Well, Peter has said earlier that he can almost tell where leaflets have been left, simply by the new signups. So that suggests that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in the types of stuff we talk about here, who don’t know about EuroGA.
The flyers have been on our stand at Friedrichshafen the past two years, and every time I visit a new airport, I leave some behind (if there is an obvious place for them).
I’ve always asked before leaving them, if it would be ok, and to date, nobody has ever said no. I just leave a bunch of them in my flight bag, and leave them whenever there is an appropriate place.
If each of us visited just five airports in a year, that’s an awful lot of airports where people could get to know about EuroGA ;)
Maybe it’s a bit egoistic, but honestly I don’t see why Euroga should become just one of the large plattforms which some of us left to come here. In the years we’ve been here, what i really appreciate here is the quality of post and posters. Were we to simply grow to larger dimensions, I wonder whether this could be maintained.
I’ve seen some fora develop like that, from a small but highly competent and socially adept group to free for all places with huge numbers of participants. Almost every time i’ve seen that happen, quality disintegrated. Some of these places are no longer useful, most of the original staff and posters have long thrown their hands up in disgust and left for other places.
EuroGA is the forum which is today my first and last read of the day, it is a source of real inspiration, knowledge and it is a socially well mixed and behaved userbase. Yes, I would love to see it thrive and grow, but rather in a slow and controlled pace than explode into something like most of us left to come here.
Just my opinion. But I think that Peter and his crew as well as the userbase in general here deserve a huge pat on the back for keeping this place what it is and developing this scene into one of the finest in the industry.
Were we to simply grow to larger dimensions, I wonder whether this could be maintained.
It can be IF you dig out pilots who make good contributions but who don’t know about us. I reckon there is a long way to go on that.
Almost every time i’ve seen that happen, quality disintegrated
As someone who hung out on the well known sites for a decade, I completely agree and David and I are very familiar with the issues. And this is why EuroGA has been structured the way it is (for example the 2 hour edit window – 1 or 2 people were unhappy with it and left, but it’s there for very good reasons). We aren’t going to let EuroGA go the way the other sites have gone. All of them, more or less.
