Banner Advertising Adjustment

[OwningProds]

Currently the system is that you sign up for advertising your services, you click through and then you need to get approved. Once approved you are in queue, whether you plan to buy the ad in a month or not, you maintain your spot in the queue without confirmation that you’re still interested in it.
Once a spot comes available, it gives a user a full day for the option to extend it, if they don’t extend, it goes to the next person and then repeats the 1 day wait period until somebody purchases and then the queue is held up again. I personally am fine to wait it out, but I think the system could be improved.

1. Make the information clearer, where is my spot in the queue? How long might I have to wait? Currently, nobody knows.
2. Once the slot ends, it should be over, reminders should be sent a day prior if they want to renew or not. Giving them an extra day is a waste of time & missed potential profit.
3. Give people 12 hours from the email as opposed to 24 hours. People who may not even have the intent to buy are holding up the queue.
4. As slots become available. People down the line in the queue should need to confirm that if it gets to them they still want it. Otherwise, they hold up the queue for 24 hours each making it impossible to get a spot unless you wait months.

I was told there is about 40 people in the queue (this isn’t all for the front page), however, if you say about 20, that is 20 days of somebody not on an ad to get your shot at one. In the 2-3 months it could take to get to you, there’s a decent chance you don’t need it anymore.

I know this is more than one thing, and not everything will fit. But the system needs work to 1. Maximize profit for MCM, and 2. Ensure MC businesses don’t need to wait months when people who don’t need slots hold up the queue.

 

[Justis]

The issues you’ve pointed out do exist, and you’re correct to do so, but we have a significantly better solution already in mind.

A credit system, where people purchase credits to fund their ads with. It would completely remove the need to wait for invoices to be paid. As soon as one ad is over, the next in line can be displayed. Since everything is pre-paid, we also wouldn’t have to worry about people dropping out of their commitment in the queue and wasting 24 hours of advertisement time per person.

This will likely need to wait until our XF2 upgrade though, so that we don’t need to get our changed completely redeveloped. It is a very large change.

 

[OwningProds]

The issues you’ve pointed out do exist, and you’re correct to do so, but we have a significantly better solution already in mind.

A credit system, where people purchase credits to fund their ads with. It would completely remove the need to wait for invoices to be paid. As soon as one ad is over, the next in line can be displayed. Since everything is pre-paid, we also wouldn’t have to worry about people dropping out of their commitment in the queue and wasting 24 hours of advertisement time per person.

This will likely need to wait until our XF2 upgrade though, so that we don’t need to get our changed completely redeveloped. It is a very large change.

This sounds great. The only thing I would suggest in addition is sharing the point in the queue people may be in. But otherwise I think that would clear up everything else I brought up!

 

[Mick]

This sounds great. The only thing I would suggest in addition is sharing the point in the queue people may be in. But otherwise I think that would clear up everything else I brought up!

Indeed, that'll definitely be a part of our new system.

Along with what Justis has suggested with the new credits system, there's also another really great idea that I've been documenting/considering for a little while now where we don't take credits from you upfront and instead you pay for your ads per day.

Say you buy $10 of ad credit. You can then buy a sticky in a forum that'll cost $1/day and rather than paying $7 upfront for a week, your credit balance automatically is deducted by $1 each day and you can cancel your ad at any time.

Our goals with the new system are to remove the delay between one persons ad ending and another being created because that increases queue times and results in missed revenue for us. The main thing I'm excited for in the new system is for us to be able to introduce much more useful and in-depth administrative tools for us to deal with ads. At the moment the ads manager we're using has a really shitty backend that makes it difficult for us to provide support for, but by building it from the ground up we should be able to make anything we want which has me really exciting.

But yeah, we won't be making any of the changes that you have suggested for our XF1 site. If you would like to discuss my ideas more for the XF2 system and give your input please create a ticket and get it assigned to me since I really do want to flesh the idea out some more

I'll move this to denied, thanks for the suggestion