Flash ad banners are out of hand!

[Str8Dancer49]

Paul, or your techies or other admins -

Sheesh, what is up with these flash ad banners at the top of the page? A full blown flash ad slows my page loading way down, even with high speed access (i've got dial up @ home, high speed @ work). And today I see Verizon has a new ad that drops animated phones down into the freaking page!

Can you give us a way to kill all flash ads on this site? maybe a non-flash version of the site? Or ax these particular ads? Yeah, I know some of this may be a package deal with the forum host contracts, but DANG! - that phone ad was just the last freaking straw.

Tell verizon flashing is illegal! haha - can ya hear me now?
Seriously, can this be fixed in any way?
thanx

[Paul G]

As I've said in another thread. My #1 priority on the site right now is increasing the speed of the pages. I'm starting a project with a team of website optimizers. They are going to construct the code so that the page content loads and then the ads will load. Instead of now where the ads load as the broswer gets to them in the code. That will help with the speed.

Now as for getting rid of flashing banners...

I just took off all pop up ads on the site. That was a very large percentage of the ad revenue. Now I have to take what banners I can get from the ad networks. I can't afford to be real picky at this point!

Ad rates are determined by a number of factors. One of them being click through rates. There are sites out there that have click throughs rates of 20-40% of thier traffic. And they are bringing in $10k plus per month on ads. They can then be real picky about what ads to display and where on the page to display them! But here our click through rate on a good day is below 1%.

Anyways, the bottom line is we're stuck with those types of ads because they pay the bills.

[Str8Dancer49]

Thank you, thank you!

You rule Paul - always a step ahead on these things.

That sounds like a great solution about having the page load first then the ads - I know that will solve my issues (don't tell the advertisers, but now I'll be able to hit the "stop" button once the powwows.com content loads and won't have to deal w/ their ads if I don't want!)

Thanks again Paul!