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1. Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:13 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

   Trying to do a bit of advertising for Improbable Island earlier and had a HELL OF A FRUSTRATING TIME OF IT

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:04 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     See, we've lost the tools for hobby websites and sole traders and small businesses to advertise themselves online.

     There's google, for massive corporations who can hire someone to literally just do their ads, and who are daft enough to pay fifty cents a click; on the other end of the extreme is begging for attention on social media, and there's nowt in between.

     I want that five-buck option back. I wanna be able to get a hundred completely untargeted random visitors and see what they think.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:05 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     We need to bring back banner exchanges, I mean it.

     Google killed them just like yahoo killed webrings because if you can just surf from site to site then you don't need search engines. Sod it let's bring them back. Aye they might've been often ugly and tacky but *you could use them* is the thing.

     You tried setting up a google ad lately? I tried them for my hosting business back in like '05 and it was a PITA, took all day, you needed to hire a person to manage it. It's no better now!

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:06 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     This sort of crap, combined with the whole "Make tiktok videos! Do youtube interviews!" nonsense... I despair, honestly, because there needs to be a better way for folk to 1) invest in webcomics and 2) get paid for making them, and it feels like the System is demanding a kind of "performance" in lieu of The Money That I Literally Want To Give To You.

     I used to spend a hundred bucks a day on PW, I struggle to spend that in a month on comicad. Seriously, cash waiting here and no bugger wants it.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:07 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     For a while I was doing that on comicad.net, but - one example out of many how this guy doesn't know what he's doing - dude cancels all your ads every 30 days and makes you spend two hours clicking to reinstate them. Through a crappy javascript thing that makes you wait for a fade-out/fade-in animation to play for each ad, and errors if you do more than one at a time.

     So I kinda had to stop the whole bidding-on-every-site thing, because of the time commitment involved.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:08 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     The most Project-Wonderful-Like alternative is called comicad.net, and it's pretty dreadful; the guy running it has no idea what he's doing or what advertisers want out of a platform.

     Example: someone makes a webcomic, puts up a PW ad, gets three visitors a week. Do I put a penny-a-day bid on it? Hell yeah I do! I'll never ever ever make any money from it but I'll let that sucker get up to $3.65 and no clicks because I know the emotional difference between getting paid NOTHING vs SOMETHING.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:09 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     And I'm here like, no, I run a friggin' TEXT ADVENTURE GAME, an advertising algorithm isn't gonna do jack for me and neither is posting on SODDING TIK TOK what the hell is a video platform gonna do for my situation

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:10 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Anyway it was great. Most of the ads you saw on Project Wonderful were for webcomics, and almost all of them were for single-person endeavours, just someone who'd made something they liked enough to pay money to get people to look at it.

     So obviously it folded.

     Now if you ask google or DDG how to promote a webcomic they tell you to... post every day on social media?

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:11 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Cool thing was if you had a new website or comic or fun little internet game and you wanted to see if it had legs or not, you could put like ten or twenty bucks into Project Wonderful and get a few hundred visitors to your site, and see if any of them stuck around past the first page.

     And they were completely random people. You could choose what sites you wanted to advertise on, but you couldn't, target a demographic explicitly, you just had to think "Folk who like this might like my site"

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Jan-2023 09:50:12 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Back in the Island's glory days, Ryan North (aye the dinosaur comics guy!) had a fantastic ad platform called Project Wonderful.

     This was way back before surveillance capitalism had its hooks in everything, and it just let people put banner ads on their site - no tracking, no spying, just a 468*60 graphic you could click on to see a cool webcomic or whatever.

     The site owner would get paid by the day, not by the impression or click, so there wasn't much bot-spam nonsense.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:19 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Free Advertising Update (see thread): between emails, DMs and replies on this thread I've had somewhere between 33 and 38 people ask for advertising, and I've put 33 ads up (some weren't a good fit or had bugs that firefox didn't like).

     The recurring theme is that all these sites are WEIRD

     I'd forgotten how WEIRD was the realm of the personal hobby website

     It is truly wonderful browsing these sites and I will generate a full page of them for you all soon

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:20 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Please do keep the requests coming in the meantime, I love seeing all these cool hobby websites and will be catching up here and there as I'm able, just bear in mind I'll take a bit longer than I did yesterday

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:21 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Update on the whole Improbable Island Free Advertising thing: this is really fun so far, and I'm gonna keep doing it and expand it, but my daughter tested positive for covid last night so my energies today will be on her and my immunocompromised spouse. I'll get some more sorted out this evening maybe.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:22 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Well I've been adding sites real fast today, I'm gonna stop for the night and catch up in the morning, keep them coming!

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:23 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     haha wow this is getting silly, I need a form or something. In the meanwhile please do keep just replying/PMing/emailing me your awesome sites!

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:24 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     So far six people have sent me their banners and URLs and are getting free advertising on Improbable Island (see thread), and several more have said aye put me in but hang on lemme sort out a banner first, and it's been, what, an hour? This rules.

     There's something REALLY satisfying about taking something that the likes of Facebook and Google are charging loads of money for, and just giving it away for free while telling adcorps to get bent

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:25 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     this is fun

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:26 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     "We're giving away free advertising because the likes of Amazon and Google and Facebook really fucking hate it when people give away free advertising, and they've never done a damn thing for us. Fuck 'em. Take back the Net."

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:27 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     " If your site is for selling things, that's fine, so long as you're a sole trader or a partnership - if you're big enough to have employees, look elsewhere. We won't run an ad for any site that we don't think is awesome or we don't think our players would like. You don't have to link back to Improbable Island, but we'd like it if you did."

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:28 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     "Rules: sites we advertise for free have to be SFW or have their NSFW bits clearly delineated (for example art sites with a seperate and clearly-marked NSFW page are fine, art sites with butts right there on the landing page are not). They don't have to be general-audience, niche is great; for example if your site is three hundred pages on historical methods of goat-rearing from 1366-1570 in SouthWestern UK outside of Cornwall because they had their own whole thing then that's fantastic."

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:29 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     "Currently, ads are shown completely at random on the New Day page. In future we may give priority to 1) websites with a "Links" page - that is, cool hobby websites that link to other cool hobby websites, and 2) independent websites on their own domain, not providing content for some big business wankers, IE davesCoolGerbilWebsite.com rather than corporateGerbilWebsite.com/thanksForTheFreeContentDave/."

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:30 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     "If you have a hobby website, fan site, independent blog, webcomic, site for your writing or music or knitting patterns or woodworking projects or whatever, send an email to admin@improbableisland.com with your 468x60 banner image and the URL you want me to link to, and I'll put it in the deck to be shuffled and shown here. No money, no catch, no bullshit, just help us reclaim the weird niche hobby internet that big business stole from us."

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:31 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     When you click the link, you see (swears!):

     "No money changed hands to show you this banner ad. This ad is appearing because CMJ doesn't like how the internet has become five massive shit websites filled with screenshots of the other four massive shit websites. For the internet to become the internet again, we've gotta get eyeballs on smaller websites, with links to other websites, so people can surf the net again (remember that?), and Improbable Island is big enough to help out with that."

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:32 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     The image was an advert for the Kaitou webcomic, and underneath it says "This is a free advert for a random Improbable Island player's hobby website. Improbable Island earns no money from this ad!"

     Underneath that is a link that says "(Why the hell are you showing it to me then?)"

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:33 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     lol I just served my first no-strings-attached free ad, I'll add an image caption in the next post

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:34 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Alright heck it I've reached a breaking point with this crap. We have GOT to make the internet more than five big crappy websites full of screenshots of the other four. Hell with it, do-it-ourselves time.

     PM me with your hobby website URL, email address and 468*60 non-animated banner image, and I'll give you free advertising on Improbable Island.

     The Island transfers 1.5 to 2 gigabytes of text a day, that's a lotta eyeballs on your ad, no catch. Boosts welcome.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:35 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     I emailed the comicad.net guy to ask him to quit cancelling all my ad bids every 30 days and fix some long-standing bugs in the bidding system and he's being super weird and evasive about whether they're actually bugs or whether he's just nicking my money

     gotta say as a guy who buys advertising on the regular this is not confidence-inspiring in the least

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:36 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     I wanna come back to that performative social media for advertising thing; it's such utter bullshit that you've gotta spend hours of your life on that rather than pay a fiver for the same result. That whole system screams "This thing you're doing is so worthless we're not even gonna ALLOW you to pay to promote it."

     So instead of paying a fiver you've gotta provide "Content" for their website. You've gotta pretend to be "Authentic."

     It's so utterly demeaning to everyone involved.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:37 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Project Wonderful's surrender to the likes of facebook and twitter hastened the death of thousands of wee webcomic sites, and that's a hell of a shame.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:05:38 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     When PW shut down, they said it was because social media was swallowing the internet and there wasn't much room for them anymore. I took copies of all my referrers from my server logs and intended to reach out to them individually to offer them a couple bucks a month for a banner ad.

     There were thousands, so I didn't get around to it until a couple years later when comicad came online.

     By then, almost all those sites weren't online anymore, bar a handful of big ones. :(

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Jan-2023 10:47:27 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     What's more, my players actually LIKE the ads!

     When was the last time you heard someone say they LIKE an ad?

     Part of it is probably where they are; they appear on the New Day page, which is a natural pausing point where folk might like to take a break and look at someone's hobby website.

     Which makes me think the best place to put an ad on a webcomic site would be, like, on a page between chapters, or between weeks/months.

     You don't want ads on every page, obvs. It annoys people!

   • honk honk I'm a truck *brrrrr* (notafurry@hulvr.com)'s status on Friday, 27-Jan-2023 08:18:41 JST honk honk I'm a truck *brrrrr*

     in reply to

     • ghorwood↙↙↙

     @ghorwood @ifixcoinops I hear this kind of thing a lot and so far have a 100% "success" rate in determining the person who did the math did not, in fact, understand the math.

   • ghorwood↙↙↙ (ghorwood@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Jan-2023 08:18:46 JST ghorwood↙↙↙

     in reply to

     @ifixcoinops oh i hear that. but said client swears they’ve done the conversion value stats and that elev bucks is a “deal”. wild.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Jan-2023 08:18:47 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     • ghorwood↙↙↙

     @ghorwood If I paid more than 5c a click on any given Project Wonderful site I reduced my bid to let someone else have a go.

   • ghorwood↙↙↙ (ghorwood@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Jan-2023 08:18:48 JST ghorwood↙↙↙

     in reply to

     @ifixcoinops fifty cents. lol. i have a client who’s paying eleven bucks.

   • publius (publius@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 27-Jan-2023 08:19:03 JST publius

     in reply to

     • honk honk I'm a truck *brrrrr*
     • ghorwood↙↙↙

     @notafurry @ghorwood @ifixcoinops

     FW Woolworth said, "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. What I don't know is which half."

     It stands to reason that the total spent on advertising can never be more than a small fraction of the total amount spent on goods and services, but today we live in a kind of upside-down world in which vast enterprises depend upon ignoring that fact.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:33 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Hobby website advertising update: trying to get this big long list of ads and banners organized a bit better, and get the email addresses of people whose sites I'm advertising, and WOW IS IT RARE FOR PEOPLE TO PUT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES ON THEIR WEBSITES THESE DAYS.

     Like, even little personal hobby sites, no email address anywhere. What the heck, did I miss a memo?

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:34 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Also check out this gorgeous stack of hobby websites from people right here on fedi, plus some Improbable Island players

     https://www.improbableisland.com/hobbysites.php?op=showall

     There's an eclectic mix of all sorts, fiction, podcasts, webcomics, music, programming, crafting, niche interests, all on single-person or small-group websites, no corporations. Proper old-school Surfing The Net feel. Some of them are in webrings!

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:35 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Giving away free advertising on Improbable Island update: I've made an ad upload system so I shouldn't have to do this manually anymore, folk who want to run a banner please check https://www.improbableisland.com/hobbysites.php and LMK here or via email if it works

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:36 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     (feel free to continue to email or DM me for free advertising in the meantime, but if you DM me please include your email in case your site moves or you make a new banner or whatever, also so I can invite you to the old-school banner exchange once I have that running)

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:37 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Over 40 of you have sent me links to your awesome personal homepages and browsing these is DELIGHTFUL.

     I'm still having problems concentrating on code, what with the covid in the house, but I've started making a better way to get free Improbable Island advertising than just emailing or DMing me and having me add things manually.

     Also, just outputting every ad one on top of another creates a lovely list of Weird Personal Homepages that I'll put online next week, here's a preview.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:38 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     (definitely gonna need some kinda System to keep track of all this soon)

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Feb-2023 10:08:39 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     40 hobby websites and personal homepages in the Improbable Island free advertising rotation now, keep 'em coming. Gimme your URL and your 468*60 non-animated banner and I'll chuck a bunch of eyeballs atcha, no catch.

   • Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 12:23:34 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Free hobby website advertising on Improbable Island update: we've banished COVID from the house, so I have more time and energy to work on this whole System here. I've caught up on all the submitted ads and built myself a neato easy-approval system so future ads can get the nod much sooner.