TextAds ends?

September 5, 2005 9:55 PM

Matt, either I missed the official announcement that you're ending the Text Ads program or there wasn't one ... What up? Not a lot of interest or...?
posted by dobbs to MetaFilter-Related at 9:55 PM (14 comments total)

I noticed that, too. When someone used the 'ole "buy a textad" retort to something. And just as I was wondering where to put this shoebox full of money I found in my back yard. I think it was someone's Subgenius donation.
posted by Balisong at 10:13 PM on September 5, 2005

After a long run (four years) I realized the traffic has gone up so much recently that ads were lasting hours instead of weeks and it was time to retool them.

At the same time, I want to launch the projects announcement site, which kind of conflicts with textads, and I'm also talking to some other advertisers to do some bigger deals and I realized it doesn't make much sense to run these things that bring in a small amount when I could save lots of system resources (every textad displayed is recorded in the database) and time by no longer managing them.

I let the last few ads run out this week, and I just removed them from the front page template, so yeah, they're officially gone and I'll launch the projects site this week.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:50 PM on September 5, 2005

Cool! Can you talk about the projects site some more, or refer me to the relevant link?
posted by jpburns at 5:22 AM on September 6, 2005

link
posted by grouse at 9:03 AM on September 6, 2005

Hey matt, I noticed that you're not planning on having comments on "TellMe" (mefi projects). I think comments would be helpful, like workshopping your idea. Maybe you should allow posters the option to enable comments. The projects page would also be pretty dull without them.
posted by delmoi at 10:35 AM on September 6, 2005

delmoi, if there were comments, there really wouldn't be any reason to repost to the main MetaFilter site, now would there be?

People will get to vote for sites they like, and anyone else is free to post the site to the main MetaFilter site. That's how it's designed to work: you announce your project to the userbase, and the good ones filter up to the main site.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:39 AM on September 6, 2005

neat!
posted by dabitch at 12:36 PM on September 6, 2005

matt: I get the concept, but I think it would be a lot more usefull as a tool if you could get feedback (for example people will have no idea why a post dosn't get posted on the front page).
posted by delmoi at 1:00 PM on September 6, 2005

delmoi, that'd be a site for workshopping ideas then, not unleashing them on the world.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:03 PM on September 6, 2005

Maybe people could just email feedback?
posted by cmonkey at 1:04 PM on September 6, 2005

Matt, what happens to projects that are cool but will never make a decent FPP? I think the overlap between "member's projects" and "potential front page links" is actually pretty small.
posted by cillit bang at 1:26 PM on September 6, 2005

cillit bang, they would get plenty of traffic from the site, and probably from other blogs that see it and post a link to it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:56 PM on September 6, 2005

And cmonkey is right on -- drop them a line. Poster keeps an email in their profile or a contact address on their site. Mefi does not have to provide the forum to discuss someone's work with them, neh?
posted by cortex at 2:16 PM on September 6, 2005

"A lot of posts MetaFilter seem to tear down the design" Should there maybe be an "on" before Metafilter? Not being snarky, just trying to help.
posted by shoepal at 12:01 AM on September 7, 2005