Inflation – ads and credits to increase in price

No More Ads!

That’s right, I don’t intend to add any more ads to the site. That doesn’t mean there will be NO ads, just that there wont be more than are showing now. I’ve had lots and lots of offers to put a link here or a banner there but I haven’t taken them because, well, the picture above says it all!

Increase Costs = Increased Charges (to advertisers)

The costs of the server and bandwidth, plus I now have a paid staff (albeit, just one) is increasing every month. Rather than be a victim of my own success and try and run the thing into the ground just like so many old cars I’ve owned and, instead of trying to squeeze money out of users who benefit from the service like so many old sites I’ve seen in the past (another sure fire way to kill something is to squeeze the people who’ve made it popular) I will increase the charge for advertising.

I am seeing more businesses take advantage of the banners, links and footer links now and it’s because the homepage is PR6, multiple sub pages throughout the site range from PR0 to PR4 and there are some serious amounts of pageviews and the CommentLuv community are a savvy bunch of technically capable bloggers who know a thing or two about this thing called the internet.

Get it now before it goes up

I allow subscriptions on the ads to run and there’s even a queue feature where you can book yourself a spot for when the next one comes up. The advantage of subscriptions is that they stay at the original price for the length of the subscription. If you’re paying 50 dollars a month now, when it goes up to 90 then you’ll still pay just 50 per month for as long as the subscription lasts.

Credits still cost the same but things you buy with them wont

I wil still be charging a dollar per credit but I will have to put up the additional urls to 5 credits per year and the default links will go up to 4 because the amount of bandwidth they are consuming is starting to cost real money every month. I hope you understand, I am not trying to squeeze the user!

No money.. no honey!

If I cannot increase the money coming in from non-advertising then the site cannot continue. Oh how I wish it could! RAM, bandwidth, load balancing, backups etc etc cost a lot of money if you want it reliable and always available. I wish that advertising was all that would be needed but, like I said above, I don’t plan on putting any more adverts on the site so the money coming from them is finite and doesn’t scale well past what it would need to for the server gods to keep happy when a million comments a day are processed.

UKFast have already done me a great favor with service and upgrades and they continue to give me a significant discount for the server because of the footer link pointing to their main site. If you get a chance, go visit their site and watch their videos. They are the premier managed hosting company in the UK and without them, ComLuv.com wouldn’t even be here.

Is it worth it?

By golly yes! I’ve been told multiple times that the links have worked to get a site higher up on the rankings, you can see a post I made on FiddyP about PR6 text link ads generating higher search rankings.

Pudding. Proof. In the…. I will be recording the screen when I click publish and then timing how long it takes for the google bot to index this post which means any links will get followed and the destination of that link will be indexed too.

here we go.. 3 2 1 (time is 08:56 am)…. [edit] it was actually 08:57 and you can see how quickly google indexed the page in the video below

oh.. one more thing (said Columbo).. here’s a link to the advertising page to Buy Advertising on ComLuv.com