I am wondering if any of you guys have ever paid for banners to be advertised anywhere, and what kind of results you got from advertising.

I am planning eventually of advertising, but don't want to waste a lot of money on it, if results are not worth it.

Vladaar

Sorry, Vladaar, I've never tried going that route, in fact, I usually don't even bother with posting ads for my mud, just listings themselves and links in my signature and such. *shrug*

We had considered paying for banner space on TMS at one time for the IMC2 network, but the high cost and limited interest caused us to think again. Then we looked at TMC and nearly died of shock.

Advertising for a MUD is less silly but even then I didn't figure doing so for Alsherok would help any in the last couple of years.

Well the mudconnector is expensive, but I know when I first started mudding I loved the site, cause zmud worked in conjunction with it, for the big list of muds. I don't really know how much traffic it gets now adays, but I do know IRE advertises the crap out of it. I am told the advertise a lot of different places as well though. So who knows what really brings them their 100+ player base.

Vladaar

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I'd say a lot more than other mud related sites…

Sadly most of the traffic there falls into a few categories. MUD admins looking for staff, MUD staff looking for MUDs to work on, players posting that they're looking for a MUD (and thus quite clearly ignoring the banners), and players browsing the MUD list or possibly the advertisement posts (which would be the one group of the four that might click the banners). I imagine most of TMC's regular users are fully desensitized to the banners, considering you see the same Iron Realms, RetroMUD, or TMCnet banner on nearly every page, with a few others thrown in. All in all, I'd advise against paying for advertisement on TMC, myself, just because the odds are stacked too high against you for the steep price.

Edit: Of course, if money isn't an issue (which I doubt, as most of us are doing this as a hobby), by all means, go ahead. Every little bit DOES help, it's just that the money could probably be spent better elsewhere.

TMC has banners? *smirk*

See? Desensitized.

Darn, you beat me to it. :lol:

Um. Yeah. TMC does have banners, but if you're using an ad-blocker of some sort, you probably won't ever see them. Like me. Firefox + Adblock Plus = No banners.

Amen to that. Aside from ads usually being poorly done or just plain unappealing, several sites I frequent take ages to load if you don't block them all. Though, I only tend to use Adblock in those particular instances, when it's to speed things up, since ads are pretty easy to ignore. Usually. I want to murder whoever thought it was a good idea to start putting sound in web ads in the most gruesome of ways.

No, like Midboss said, I've just become desensitized to them enough that I don't notice them anymore even without a blocker. I know they're there, I just don't see them. :shrug:

Though you have a valid point, with a decent ad blocker, you wouldn't even have them show up at all either.

Nods, I see them on the screen, I just ignore them entirely.

I've thought about paying for advertising for MudBytes, but I wasn't considering TMC, or TMS when paying. I looked into the packages that IGN had, and never really got a definite price as to how much it was going to cost me. There were hints, and I figured that it was something I just couldn't afford :). I don't really think TMC is that expensive when you consider some of the other sites out there.

Has anyone considered banners outside of the normal mudding sites? Eg, on a forum for roleplaying games, or for MMORPG players?

I ran a banner on TMC once for 2 months back when the site was still somewhat reputable. It resulted in about 1000 new people connecting… for about 10 to 30 seconds.

It was fun to watch the connection logs go spamming by, and some people actually stuck around for a bit, but otherwise it was a pretty futile enterprise.

That sounds about right. I have a feeling advertising outside the MUD community (specifically on big gaming sites such as GameFAQs or IGN) would yield worse overall results, though. The gaming community at large is focusing more and more on polygon counts these days, so I think the sight of something that doesn't even have 2D sprites might cause mass aneurysms and a lot of "lolz fucken gay" comments. Then again, the sheer number of people who may or may not be checking it out for that 10-30 seconds if you advertised there would be a lot higher.

I was planning to advertise out of my own pocket on MudMagic before the incident happened.

Actually, Dragona and I do already have reciprocal banner links for our mud just like the one we have on here with several D&D forums and related sites.

As we are Final Fantasy and Chrono series based, I'm going to do my best to get some links or banners on at least a few sites oriented around those.

I'm thinking chronocompendium.com first and foremost, because they are really good about promoting fan projects, and if Final Fantasy MUX doesn't have something exclusive with finalfantasycompendium.com, I'm going to try there as well. I think frequenting some other forums and fansites for the theme outside of the MUDing community will do some good. So I have ideas there that I think has a somewhat decent chance of paying off.

Regardless, though, I do plan on buying about 3-6 months of advertising on TMC for when we first open to try to increase initial exposure. The hardest thing about opening a MUD is attracting that initial playerbase, because if no one is on when new people come in, they leave. So trying to get as many people right out of the gate is a high priority for me. If the TMC banners seem to do some good, I might look at extending the length of time, but we'll just have to wait and see on that.

On that note, I'm thinking about having a voluntary survey that new characters can fill out get a reward, like a quest point or something like that, and the main point of it would be to see which avenue of advertising is the most effective, and focus our energies there. If TMC forum posts seem to be driving traffic to our game significantly more than paying for the banner, then obviously the banners are a waste of money for us. I'm thinking an email address would be used in the survey so we could count player data more so than character data… ie: 10 characters with the same email address would all get their QP, but in compiling our data for which ad is more effective, that would count as one 'vote' or whatever.