More advertising options for pro. Free sites stay ad-supported

by michal-frackowiak on 17 Mar 2010 08:33

More options for Pro users

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Starting 2. April we would like to give Pro users better ways to monetize their sites. So far AdSense has been the only supported option. It has been working well for some users, but we frequently get questions about including other ad networks.

As a solution we will provide a tool within Site Manager to set up ads based on HTML code generated by a particular ad network. For example, if you have a Google AdSense account, you could go to your AdSense panel, create a new ad, get the code and paste it directly into your ad config on Wikidot. We would also give you options to set placement, visibility etc.

Such a solution would have a few advantages over the existing setup:

  • users will not use our AdSense panel, which duplicates most options from Google's AdSense panel and is difficult to maintain,
  • users will receive 100% of generated revenue, instead of 80% as it is now,
  • ads will not be limited to AdSense - Tribal Fusion, CPX, Amazon and other networks will be supported too.

The above option will be presented only to Pro Lite, Pro and Pro+ users. If you are a free user and would like to earn money from your sites, please upgrade your account.

Shutting down AdSense API integration

At the same time we would like to disable our AdSense API integration completely — there is no reason to keep it around if we are coming up with an equivalent (or even better) solution.

Advertising on free sites

In the same move we are changing the advertising policy for free sites: free site admins will not be allowed to monetize their sites. Instead we will continue placing ads on free sites in a non-intrusive way, but we would like to have the exclusive right to do so. Our Terms of Service will be updated accordingly.

If you are a free user, and would like to escape our advertising or earn money from your sites, the cheapest upgrade to our Pro Lite plan is less than $5 a month, and will bring some other goodies to your sites.


The changes, including dropping our current AdSense integration, will take effect 2. April, but we will give Pro users a clean way to migrate their ads to a new system sooner. We will also notify admins of all affected sites.


UPDATE: for technical details about implementation of ad management panel, please look at the corresponding design.

UPDATE: Current AdSense panel (at https://www.wikidot.com/panel:adsense) will be operational for a few more days, till 6. April. This is to provide more time for users to safely change their ads, and move to the new configuration. Till then, both ways of configuring ads (old and new) will work.

Image comes from http://www.flickr.com/photos/44858457@N00/3147785989/

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