imported post
trx680 wrote:
Mike wrote:
trx680 wrote:
Just from the half-dozen or so gun related forums I browse only one has a section dedicated for its members to sell/buy/trade firearms and accessories.....wonder why?
it might be to retain Google Ad revenue - google cuts off web sites if they purport to asist in firearms transfers - Google cut us off a few months ago because some folks just discussed some transfers of firearms - very dissapointing at John and I were just starting to offset the roughly $4,000 a year it costs us to web host this site
Ever thought of offering advertising on the forum. Example, the Virginia section of the forum, you could have Virginia based gun stores run an ad with a link to their website. Do that for all 50 states... $100 a year times 50 states = $5k ... thats $1000 left over to buy ammo !!
How does the Google Ad thing work?
Unfortunately, Google is one of the more liberal companies out there, despite their usefulness to the internet community.
I did read through their TOS, but didn't recall that they were so blatantly anti-gun as to refuse to make money from sites that relate to perfectly legal transactions. It tells you quite a bit when someone's anti-gun bias stands in their way of making money.
I wonder if publicity about this (their discrimination against perfectly legal activity) would make any difference?
The Google ad program is in two parts: AdSense and AdWords. Web sites wishing to host advertisements sign up for AdSense. Google provides you with code snippets to include on your web site, and once your site is crawled and the content is known, then content-appropriate advertisements are placed on your site in the places where you place the code snippets. For the most part, when visitors see the ads, and click on them, a small amount of income is added to your account. Most clicks are worth just a few cents, but some highly specialized ads can generate more. Once your account reaches $100, they issue payment.
AdWords is the program that the advertisers use. They sign up for key words that they want to target, and provide the ads to Google, along with a "bid" amount on what they are willing to pay for a click on the ad. Google then places these ads on sites that they have previously crawled, and are associated with the key words. You can also target ads for specific web sites. The payment for those is based on views, and tends to be very small, so unless you have a very high volume web site, you will probably do better with the click-through model.
They claim to place the ads with the highest bids on the pages with the appropriate key words, but obviously the intricate details are behind the scenes, and they don't talk about it.
TFred