Notices by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@mstdn.social), page 3

"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."

this is fun

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

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!

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!

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.

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

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

Is there a name for like the opposite of sealioning, where someone pops up in your mentions to say no you're absolutely right and furthermore here's previously unconsidered information about the thing you're right about, illustrating a new way in which you're right that you hadn't even considered, elevating your rightness to a whole new level of irrefutability

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

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.

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"

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Portable computer storage in 1993:
* Size of your palm
* Just a tape that's been squished flat into a disc shape, understandable technology
* Big paper sticker you can write on to say what's on it
* Programs aplenty to test/repair if you leave it on a radiator or speaker
* Sturdy unless badly abused

Portable computer storage today:
* Size of your smallest fingernail
* Unknowable magic
* Can't be labelled, pencil won't work
* Testing? Feh
* Dies if you look at it too hard

MicroSD was a mistake