.... but it may not be what you think.

Most of you saw this coming and probably dreaded the day. Through the good offices of Project Wonderful, LostCoastGaming.com has officially entered the world of online advertising.

Is it because I think I'm going to somehow make a buttload of money off the traffic on this site? Hear that snickering laughter?

That answer would be a solid "No." But then, why?

That answer is actually a bit more interesting.

After considering all my options (Paypal donation buttons, nagware screens for donations, selling "premium" memberships, and/or Google Adsense *shudder*), I decided to go with Project Wonderful. Here's why:

Project Wonderful allows advertisers to target their message to their chosen audiences, control how much they spend, and for how long, on any given ad. All ads are run by "auction" and the highest bidder at any given time runs their ad until either the run expires, they run out of money, or they are outbid by a competitor.

Popular sites with hundreds of thousands of Page Views per Day (PVD) get top dollar for space on their sites. Sites like this one, which currently averages 2500 page views a day, have to settle for more modest amounts. I can set a minimum amount for ads in our space, and I have, but in general this is all demand driven -- if we can generate the numbers, the site can generate the revenue and Project Wonderful is only taking 25% of the proceeds as their cut.

They give me as the publisher quite a bit of control over the ads that will appear here -- I've insisted all ads be "Safe for Work" and for now, no animations -- and even the right to refuse ads if I/we don't like them for whatever reason, or none at all. Most of the ads I've seen for our keywords (or tags, if you like) thus far have been for some pretty cool sites -- web comics, MMORPGs, some adult online serial fiction, stuff like that. The revenues generated by these ads will collect in an account kept by Project Wonderful and if I wanted, I could start withdrawing from it once it reaches $10 USD.

(Those of you who've ever had dealings with Google Adsense are probably agog right now -- and I can't blame you. I was too, when I first read through the terms on PW's site.)

And so we finally get to the "why" of all this: Because it's going to fund LCG's outreach.

Once we get a bit saved up at PW I'll start bidding for ad spaces on other sites to get LCG's name and logo and other "branding" type stuff out there. We've got a pretty good thing going here but out biggest problem right now is that we're largely unknown and the "signal to noise" ratio out there on the web is pretty fierce.

I've asked most of you to spread the word and ask your friends and fellow gamers to join us, and some of you have (thank you!); I've required new GMs to recruit a percentage of their players from offsite (mostly) and yet we're still too dangerously close to "game saturation." We need a steady influx of new gamers -- it doesn't have to be a huge flood (actually, that would be bad) but a constant stream of new members cascading down that block to the right would be pretty sweet, I think.

Especially if they can approach the superb quality of the gamers already here.

So there you have it. No master plan rake in millions (or even hundreds) based on the high-quality content here -- just a way, maybe, to help us get the word out about who we are, and what we've got.

As always, your constructive feedback is treasured. :)