Follow up - Adverts on LES

AnthonySmith

Hi Folks,

Further to the previous discussion https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11180/les-update-where-we-are-what-is-next-and-more-changes I am forking the advertising side of that discussion into this thread.

The support was good, and the overall feedback was positive, which, given that we are talking about the A word, is a bit of a surprise but shows good support for making this place grow.

What I have done.

I have plugged the karma system and FastSpring (card, PayPal, Venmo, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc) into an advertising square system on LES.

It is a bit different to how it is done on LET who use BuySellAds, they only allow hosting related adverts and only allow adverts in general, they charge $125 per 125x125 square, LES who has probably only around 20% of the traffic is charging $7 per 150x150 square, which works out at about 2 - 3% of the cost per pixel for the same amount of traffic

We are also allowing any members to take a square, and on top of that, you can use your good karma to pay for them instead of money. If you have been active here and contributed well, then you have probably built up a lot of good karma (thanks), and now you can spend it on this, the price is 70 karma per month per square.

It is also different as you can buy a 1x1 a 2x1 a 1x2 or a 2x2 square, or as many of any configuration as you want, if you have a 300x300 image to show or space to use, you can take a 2x2 and you can add or remove as many as you want at any time and your subscription will update accordingly.

When is this happening

I am just waiting for the final conversion to go live from the FastSpring rep, so I expect probably at the end of this week at the latest, its just the flip of a switch on the backend now, and it goes live, and the link shows up.

What is allowed

Well, its for anyone, so you can advertise your hosting or services, you can advertise your kite shop, your personal website, another hosting related forum, your reddit group, your facebook page, really I dont care, the only rule is that it must be suitable for all age groups: nothing offensive, political, or anything trying to skirt a grey line "an adgitation" so to speak.

If you abuse it, it's a direct ban: zero warning, zero appeal, just gone along with the advert and your account, if you are unsure if something is ok you can always ask; no excuses accepted.

How it works.

You have a few choices: first, you select your square size and how you want to pay (FastSpring or Karma)

Then you can either upload your image (max frames = 2 hard cap) or you can upload multiple images and set unique links for A/B testing OR you can simply set the square not to display i.e. remove that square from the site.

You will get stats on how many impressions you get and how many clicks etc, it will also be broken down into what we can pretty much guarantee are human impressions vs 'could be bots, could be some sort of privacy extension, unsure if human though' rather than pretend the numbers are sky high by counting LLM page crawlers like other places do to inflate value.

With karma, you can book the square for up to 3 months in advance; you need to manually renew within 14 days of expiry to keep it.

With direct payments, you set up a subscription which you can manage from here and cancel or increase at any time, that is taken monthly on the date you set it up recurring, when possible there will be a pro rated cost if you add a square on the 1st and then want another on the 10th for example, if the fee is lessthan $2 then that is charged as a minimum to cover fees and to allow all endpoints to accept the transaction.

Squares are shown on the side menu only on desktop, and on mobile a 2x2 block (can be made up of 4 1x1 or 2 2x1 or just a single 2x2, every 7 posts or at the end of a thread with <7 posts per page.

Tax and VAT invoices and Payments in general.

FastSpring is a merchant of record; you are never a direct customer of lowendspirit, you are a customer of FastSpring, and FastSpring is our only customer, so we never need to store your personal information here at lowendspirit.

FastSpring will charge you any applicable VAT or local/state tax due at the point of transaction, and that tax will be paid directly to your EU member state or local state government office by FastSpring, all valid exemption numbers are accepted, if no tax ro VAT is due, none will be charged, if you use a VPN during payment, you will likley be either treated as a member of the origin state of your IP or rejected if you flag a risk factor for completing a purchae via a datacenter registered IP locatioed far away from your payment method.

Obviously no tax on karma.

Can I block it?

Probably and trivially, and I am genuinely not concerned if people do; it's just not worth worrying about. If you do not want to see adverts or content or links or pictures of pants or links to people's projects, no problem; that is your choice. I am not going to provide an on/off button, though.

Screenshots so you know what to expect:

How will this benefit LES.

• It will cover and recoup the costs mentioned in the previous thread
• it will allow the LES infrastructure to expand and become more redundant with a better backup system
• it will allow me to start hunting for VPS servers to review and bring new content into the community, not just from the regulars.
• I will be able to start doing bulk deals with hosts to buy down offers, which will be exclusive to LES.
• I will be able to do more work to try to advance some of the free service providers that post here to make life better for them and have them provide more resources to LES members.

Finally

I understand not everyone will like this; sorry, it is going to happen anyway, as this is the best idea I have to advance the community as a whole. If you have better ones, you have also had a lot of opportunity to present them; for now, try to live with it. If you can't, I understand.

If this fails, no one is interested, or it just ends up being a giant long-term karma-based block to hide all squares, I also understand. I am not going to try to fight it; it is what it is. I will take that as a sign.

I am still open to any other feedback and ideas, as always. Angry throwaway comments that add nothing of substance are generally mentally filtered out now, though, so feel free to throw them at me too

ahnlak

Does that imply that one can buy a space and simply not use it (which would seem to resolve your 'donation' issue)?

AnthonySmith

@ahnlak said:
Does that imply that one can buy a space and simply not use it (which would seem to resolve your 'donation' issue)?

yes exactly

Basically makes the square transparent so it never shows up.

cmeerw

@AnthonySmith said: Then you can either upload your image (max frames = 2 hard cap) or you can upload multiple images and set unique links for A/B testing OR you can simply set the square not to display i.e. remove that square from the site.

Can these be updated during the month?

AnthonySmith

@cmeerw said: Can these be updated during the month?

Yes, any time you want, as many times as you want.

edit:

Maybe its handy just to show the A/B testing too

To change it any time, you select the square and click Remove (you still own the space) then just re-add your new image and link and mouse over test/alt text

david3

This looks pretty good. Is it a custom setup that you wrote (or had done)?

AnthonySmith

@david3 said:
This looks pretty good. Is it a custom setup that you wrote (or had done)?

Yeah, I have been working on it; it's all based around FastSprings subscription API. It's basically the Karma store smashed together with the Tierhive payment system code and modified for vanilla and squares instead of tokens or Karma images.