I'm a pretty frequent user of StumbleUpon, and for me personally anytime a website forces you to click through an ad to get to content, I just move right on. I don't want this to end up hurting aD. I understand the need for ads to make money to support the website, but I really feel like this will hurt more then it helps.
I understand your position, but I'd also like to argue that we at least _tried_ to make the ad be as easy to get rid of as possible, with page loading into the background, being visible there and "Continue to AfterDawn" link closing the Verizon ad immediately when clicked. After all, we're in this slightly annoying "big, but not huge" category of sites that get direct U.S. ad proposals quite rarely and rather take them than turn the advertisers away (hoping that if the experience is smooth for them, they'd consider our site also in the future for their campaigns -> thus, having better targeted and higher value ads in future). But yep, most likely, if we get similar deals in the future, we'll exclude our logged-in users from those campaigns (exactly what we do already for variety of ads, such as in-text ads on forums). Anyway, thanks for the feedback -- and the campaign is a one-day campaign, so it wont bug you tomorrow, if you wish to reconsider your position on coming back to our site or not
Haha alright, I wasn't about to stop visiting. It doesn't show up every time I hit the page, which is nice, and definitely am fine with the intermediate tactic. And it less intrusive then many pop over ads. How does the ad work? Are first time visitors definitely getting it? Glad you guys are getting the attention of some attention from some big companies. Thanks dRD
I've got flashblock and noscript running in FF, so all I see is an empty screen and some text at the top telling me I can "continue to afterdawn". I must admint, the blank screen is almost as obtrusive than seeing the ad.
Which is why, I suggest you whitelist AfterDawn for your blocks We, unlike many major websites, _try_ to keep the number of ads in minimum -- and don't exactly bathe in cash, but instead, try to use every single nickel we get, to develop our site further (be it from technical perspective or by hiring more writers). As funny as it is, I said to DarkJello yesterday that we get directly-sold-to-our-site campaign extremely rarely -- and on the very next day (today) we got HP's welcome screen/gateway ad booked, after running the Verizon yesterday. Patience guys, patience, we'll implement the "not shown for logged in users" shortly Btw. those ads are shown only once every 24hrs, if you have your cookies enabled.
I use Firefox, and In general I set it to accept all cookies (even third party) but only until I close FF. I have an exception to allow (keep) certain sites afterdawn.com included. However, if I close FF and reopen, the ad. appears again when visiting FF. Regarding the aggressive use of blocking (Flash in particular), there may be something you haven't considered. Those of us still using older PC's to browse the net - Flash is so resource heavy (why does it need that much CPU to display a small video or animation?) that leaving it on slows the PC almost to a halt. Using Flashblock is the only thing that makes web browsing viable. (I'm talking about a 550MHz PC from 1999)
Actually the new welcome screen advertisement was already disabled for users that were logged in. So if you had an active AfterDawn login when you entered the site for the first time yesterday, you should not have seen the advertisement at all. The advertisements are served from a different domain (afterdawn.net as opposed to afterdawn.com), which is why you saw the advertisement again and again when closing and re-opening the browser. If third party cookies (in this case afterdawn.net's cookies) are deleted, the ad server thinks you haven't seen the ad yet and shows it. The problem you described can be solved by allowing afterdawn.net to store cookies.
