Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
On Friday 14 January 2005 04:14, Jim Wilson wrote: Sort of a little off topic: Something that would be really cool (at least in the US) is to have a registered non-profit that just collected donations (like United Way) and then uses those funds to make grants to individual projects like flightgear. I'm not sure of the legalities, but perhaps such an organization could accept tax deductable gifts from individuals that are directed to specific projects by the donor. Maybe there is already something like this? FSF supports official gnu projects, and allows a limited number of directed donations, but only at their discretion. http://www.linuxfund.org/ maybe? I don't think it would hurt to ask them. --Ivo ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
[Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Dumb question: do we want to investigate the possibility of adding google adds to the FlightGear site? Is this out of bounds, or within bounds for an open-source project. It's a potential revenue generator, but it's unclear if it will generate $0.39 per month or $39.00 per month or $390.00 per month. As I understand it, we create a space on our page, and google puts whatever they want there, but they try to be as relevant to our page as their algorithms will let them. Supposedly we have ways to block competitor's adds in case (for instance) we don't want MSFS adds to show up on our page. Is this worth looking into, or would it be crossing some sort of open-source ethical line? Thanks, Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Curtis L. Olson wrote: Dumb question: do we want to investigate the possibility of adding google adds to the FlightGear site? FWIW, it's fine with me. If the worst thing FlightGear does in this world is make Curt rich, I suspect I'll still be able to sleep at night. :) Seriously, having some extra cash available for FlightGear-specific stuff (hardware purchases, maybe, or conference travel/demo stuff) can't be a bad thing. I don't see any ethical problems here. Andy ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Curtis L. Olson said: Dumb question: do we want to investigate the possibility of adding google adds to the FlightGear site? Is this out of bounds, or within bounds for an open-source project. It's a potential revenue generator, but it's unclear if it will generate $0.39 per month or $39.00 per month or $390.00 per month. As I understand it, we create a space on our page, and google puts whatever they want there, but they try to be as relevant to our page as their algorithms will let them. Supposedly we have ways to block competitor's adds in case (for instance) we don't want MSFS adds to show up on our page. Is this worth looking into, or would it be crossing some sort of open-source ethical line? It probably is, because high ethical standards are fundamental to the open-source concept. A few general ethical issues along those lines: - more commercial appearance to site. - ads are not particularly effective for advertisers (compared to adwords on the google search engine pages), but they make a lot of money for Google. - the content being linked to is not necessarily on the up and up. Google does not screen new advertisers like aol and overture do. So ads for snake oil and free software with spy/adware can show up. Just do a google search on viagra or baldness and you'll see what I mean. You could add a couple more items to the cdrom page and call it a Store like Mozilla does. PostGres runs their own ads, but not on the home page and only one per page. It seems prudent to look at other high profile projects (Flightgear is getting there!) and try not to stand out to much in the area of commercialization. Google might be easy, but if there is an option that might be a little more work (and better) I'd be glad to help out (rather than just being a nay sayer ;-)). One good thing might be just a Donations link like a lot of oss web sites show. Make sure that it is clear that even small donations are appreciated (so that folks don't think they can't afford it). Best, Jim ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
One thing that you might want to consider is that the clickthough rate is really low. And is it really worth it. I've been using AdSense for awhile now and the clickthough rate, at least for me is very low on average. An average of 0.5%. That's with about 4000 impressions. On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:28:02 -, Jim Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Curtis L. Olson said: Dumb question: do we want to investigate the possibility of adding google adds to the FlightGear site? Is this out of bounds, or within bounds for an open-source project. It's a potential revenue generator, but it's unclear if it will generate $0.39 per month or $39.00 per month or $390.00 per month. As I understand it, we create a space on our page, and google puts whatever they want there, but they try to be as relevant to our page as their algorithms will let them. Supposedly we have ways to block competitor's adds in case (for instance) we don't want MSFS adds to show up on our page. Is this worth looking into, or would it be crossing some sort of open-source ethical line? It probably is, because high ethical standards are fundamental to the open-source concept. A few general ethical issues along those lines: - more commercial appearance to site. - ads are not particularly effective for advertisers (compared to adwords on the google search engine pages), but they make a lot of money for Google. - the content being linked to is not necessarily on the up and up. Google does not screen new advertisers like aol and overture do. So ads for snake oil and free software with spy/adware can show up. Just do a google search on viagra or baldness and you'll see what I mean. You could add a couple more items to the cdrom page and call it a Store like Mozilla does. PostGres runs their own ads, but not on the home page and only one per page. It seems prudent to look at other high profile projects (Flightgear is getting there!) and try not to stand out to much in the area of commercialization. Google might be easy, but if there is an option that might be a little more work (and better) I'd be glad to help out (rather than just being a nay sayer ;-)). One good thing might be just a Donations link like a lot of oss web sites show. Make sure that it is clear that even small donations are appreciated (so that folks don't think they can't afford it). Best, Jim ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d -- Arthur/ - http://artooro.blogspot.com (Weblog) - http://machcms.sourceforge.net (MachCMS Project) - http://acalproj.sourceforge.net (Calendar Project) ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Jim Wilson wrote: It probably is, because high ethical standards are fundamental to the open-source concept. A few general ethical issues along those lines: - more commercial appearance to site. - ads are not particularly effective for advertisers (compared to adwords on the google search engine pages), but they make a lot of money for Google. - the content being linked to is not necessarily on the up and up. Google does not screen new advertisers like aol and overture do. So ads for snake oil and free software with spy/adware can show up. Just do a google search on viagra or baldness and you'll see what I mean. Hi Jim, I don't want to get caught up parsing nuances here. Commercial vs. non-commercial is a continuum, but I'm not sure there is any ethics attached to that. I might be more concerned with tacky vs. non-tacky. I don't know if having a more commercial appearance is an ethical issue ... it maybe an issue relating to what appearance we want to convey, but to me it's not an ethical issue in and of itself. From our perspective, we don't care about the effectiveness of adds, that's not our problem. ;-) We don't have complete control over the content that get's advertised, but we do have some control. We can filter out specific sites we don't want, and we can filter out some broadbased categories, such as adult adds or death/chaos/war adds. The idea of google adds is not to display any random viagra or low-rate-mortage advertisement, but target the adds based on the specific content of the page using advance google search technology (probably TM.) That makes the service more attractive to vendors and [hopefully] makes the adds a little more appropriate/relevant to people that visit our page. That said, google is ultimately in control of what goes in the space we give them. It may very well be that google already know everything about everyone, and rather than placing page-relevant adds, places user-relevant adds. (Could be why you only see those snake-oil adds.) :-) You could add a couple more items to the cdrom page and call it a Store like Mozilla does. PostGres runs their own ads, but not on the home page and only one per page. It seems prudent to look at other high profile projects (Flightgear is getting there!) and try not to stand out to much in the area of commercialization. Google might be easy, but if there is an option that might be a little more work (and better) I'd be glad to help out (rather than just being a nay sayer ;-)). I'm told there are several choices for how much space we give google, supposedly we can do graphics or text only adds, even single vs. multiple adds. I imagine that the rate of return is proportional to how much space we give them, but they don't really say. Clearly we can make this more or less obnoxious depending on what size / qty. adds we enable. Can we make it suitably non-obnoxious is the big question for me. One good thing might be just a Donations link like a lot of oss web sites show. Make sure that it is clear that even small donations are appreciated (so that folks don't think they can't afford it). Do these sorts of donation links actually work? I'd be tempted to point the donations link to tsunami relief or other charities, but then I'd risk being political in my choice of organizations. With google, they get to take the heat. :-) Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Having experience of google adwords myself, I'd just like to make an observation: If you have a well designed website (such as flightgear.org) where all information is clearly laid out and you didn't employ any 'tricks' to make someone arrive at your site. ...chances are the 'visitor' has already found all the information they want and will not follow an ad link. As far as I can see, to actually produce revenue from adwords, you must need an annoying site that spams keywords to get page-views and hope that people will click the ads in self-defence just to get away from your site ;-) Dave Martin ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:39:07 -0600 Curtis L. Olson wrote: Is this worth looking into, or would it be crossing some sort of open-source ethical line? I don't think it's crossing an ethical line. That doesn't mean we wanna do it, though; just that I don't think *that's* the reason not to. I remember this thread on banner ads from July; there may be some insightful points there: http://baron.flightgear.org/pipermail/flightgear-devel/2004-July/029398.html One question I have is how binding the agreement would be. Suppose after a couple of weeks of GoogleAds, everyone says this sucks and wants to get rid of them. Could we? Or would we be stuck with having them on the website for 3 months/6 months/a year because those were the terms of the agreement? I'd feel less favorable to them if I thought there was no way out if they turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. -c -- Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (remove snip-me. to email) As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I have become civilized. - Chief Luther Standing Bear pgpc4AjgQcXx1.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
On Thursday 13 Jan 2005 22:33, Chris Metzler wrote: One question I have is how binding the agreement would be. Suppose after a couple of weeks of GoogleAds, everyone says this sucks and wants to get rid of them. Could we? Or would we be stuck with having them on the website for 3 months/6 months/a year because those were the terms of the agreement? I'd feel less favorable to them if I thought there was no way out if they turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. -c There is no binding agreement to continue to run the ads for any pre-determined time. There is a binding agreement not to discuss the adwords system / payments (whoops) and all adwords accounts are subject to acceptance based on the content of the site. Dave Martin ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Dave Martin wrote: Having experience of google adwords myself, I'd just like to make an observation: If you have a well designed website (such as flightgear.org) where all information is clearly laid out and you didn't employ any 'tricks' to make someone arrive at your site. ...chances are the 'visitor' has already found all the information they want and will not follow an ad link. As far as I can see, to actually produce revenue from adwords, you must need an annoying site that spams keywords to get page-views and hope that people will click the ads in self-defence just to get away from your site ;-) Here is a screen shot of about as unobstrusive of an add as I can configure: http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/tmp/fgfs-ads.jpg I did a quick test and I see that we would mostly be advertising MSFS related stuff, I'm not sure I like that or not. :-) I may fiddle with a few other things in the short term ... Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Dave Martin wrote: There is no binding agreement to continue to run the ads for any pre-determined time. There is a binding agreement not to discuss the adwords system / payments (whoops) and all adwords accounts are subject to acceptance based on the content of the site. Yes, we could bail at any time if: - We think it's too tacky. - Too many people get sick of it. - We get tired of peddling MSFS stuff - The return does not make any of the above points more tolerable. - Any other reason. Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
On Friday 14 January 2005 00:14, Dave Martin wrote: On Thursday 13 Jan 2005 22:45, Curtis L. Olson wrote: Here is a screen shot of about as unobstrusive of an add as I can configure: http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/tmp/fgfs-ads.jpg I'd avoid giving them 1st place on a side bar (breaks the site's 'feel') Second or third on the sidebar so they're almost half way down on a 1024x768 browser window usually looks best. Or maybe on the right side, like Slashdot does? --Ivo ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
On Thursday 13 January 2005 23:45, Curtis L. Olson wrote: Here is a screen shot of about as unobstrusive of an add as I can configure: http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/tmp/fgfs-ads.jpg I don't like the place where this advertisement is set. The size is ok, but it should not be at the sidebar. I prefer it this way like in this example: http://tinypic.com/18ydn6 Best Regards, Oliver C. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Curtis L. Olson said: I don't want to get caught up parsing nuances here. Commercial vs. non-commercial is a continuum, but I'm not sure there is any ethics attached to that. To some, nuances matter and to some commerial vs. non-commercial is in fact an ethic issue. Especially when it comes to advertising. That said I should add the disclaimer that I make a living in commerce. I might be more concerned with tacky vs. non-tacky. I don't know if having a more commercial appearance is an ethical issue ... it maybe an issue relating to what appearance we want to convey, but to me it's not an ethical issue in and of itself. Now _that_ is a nuance of meaning. It seems that ethics are mostly about trust (relationships) and self esteem (doing the right thing) **, but appearances are meaningful (note that I will not be posting photos of my office). Just for giggles I typed Ethical Appearance into Google and this was the first link: http://www.character-ethics.org/articles/ethicalappearance.htm ** ok so I'm an athiest. From our perspective, we don't care about the effectiveness of adds, that's not our problem. ;-) There's an ethical perspective for ya. :-) We don't have complete control over the content that get's advertised, but we do have some control. We can filter out specific sites we don't want, and we can filter out some broadbased categories, such as adult adds or death/chaos/war adds. It's pretty much automatic and changes minute by minute. Ads that we are not proud of will show up from time to time. The idea of google adds is not to display any random viagra or low-rate-mortage advertisement, but target the adds based on the specific content of the page using advance google search technology (probably TM.) I understand the content placement methods. It isn't unique to Google either. Those snake oil examples were just illustrations of the fact that Google doesn't control the ads completely. They will remove ads from people doing bad things, but that happens after the ads start to run, not before. I'm told there are several choices for how much space we give google, supposedly we can do graphics or text only adds, even single vs. multiple adds. I imagine that the rate of return is proportional to how much space we give them, but they don't really say. Clearly we can make this more or less obnoxious depending on what size / qty. adds we enable. Can we make it suitably non-obnoxious is the big question for me. You won't do anything tacky or obnoxious, no doubt of that from here :-) Do these sorts of donation links actually work? I'd be tempted to point the donations link to tsunami relief or other charities, but then I'd risk being political in my choice of organizations. With google, they get to take the heat. :-) Hehe...maybe we should do a donate to Google, Inc link? ;-) There are so many people doing these paypal donation links that it can't be too difficult. It might end up being nothing but maybe it'll help some. I'm willing to bet that folks on the lists would step up and send a paypal donation if a specific requirement came up. Some time ago I saw one site that actually kept a running total of donations, expenses, and anticipated needs. Maybe that wouldn't help, but it looked pretty cool. Sort of a little off topic: Something that would be really cool (at least in the US) is to have a registered non-profit that just collected donations (like United Way) and then uses those funds to make grants to individual projects like flightgear. I'm not sure of the legalities, but perhaps such an organization could accept tax deductable gifts from individuals that are directed to specific projects by the donor. Maybe there is already something like this? FSF supports official gnu projects, and allows a limited number of directed donations, but only at their discretion. Best, Jim ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 03:14:50 - Jim Wilson wrote: Sort of a little off topic: Something that would be really cool (at least in the US) is to have a registered non-profit that just collected donations (like United Way) and then uses those funds to make grants to individual projects like flightgear. I'm not sure of the legalities, but perhaps such an organization could accept tax deductable gifts from individuals that are directed to specific projects by the donor. Maybe there is already something like this? FSF supports official gnu projects, and allows a limited number of directed donations, but only at their discretion. The one thing I'm aware of that's similar to this is Software in the Public Interest ( http://www.spi-inc.org/ ). Donations to SPI are passed on to free software projects that they've chosen to support (primarily Debian, the LSB, and the OSI). People can also make earmarked donations to SPI that are then passed on to the relevant organizations. SPI is a 501(c)(3) organization. I don't know how you get to be one of the projects they support. The Board of Directors is mainly made up of current or former Debianistas (Ian Jackson, Bruce Perens, and so on), and SPI is normally spoken-of in terms of being the donation route for Debian. I don't think it'd be a bad thing to contact them and see if FlightGear can get added to their list of supported projects -- it'd be a comparatively painless way to effectively have 501(c)(3) status. I expect the worst that can happen is for them to say no, sorry, can't add you on. -c -- Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (remove snip-me. to email) As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I have become civilized. - Chief Luther Standing Bear pgpyS0cnxZR2N.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Google adwords?
Curtis L. Olson wrote: Ok, I'm done playing around with this for the day and have removed the test adds from our page. The adds we get from google aren't all that exciting or relevent ... it's not like the subject of our site is something interesting like farm tractors. If anyone else has thoughts let me know. The more I think about it, the less comfortable I am with the google adds for FlightGear. 99.9% of the adds are MSFS specific which doesn't send the message I want to send. I did make $0.67 this afternoon for the 30 minutes I had these turned on. It's enough to be tempting if you extrapolate that out over 24 hours or a whole month, but it's so dang annoying to see endless FS2002 and FS2004 adds ... all the links point to stuff that is not compatible with FlightGear. I'm kind of thinking I'll just leave this turned off for now. Curt. -- Curtis Olsonhttp://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text:2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
