Notices by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social), page 2

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

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.

(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)

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

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!

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?

@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.

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!

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. :(

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?)"

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."

"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."

"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/."

"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."

" 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."