IvorW wrote:

...

-----Original Message----- From: openguides-london-bounces@openguides.org [mailto:openguides-london-bounces@openguides.org]On Behalf Of Kake L Pugh Sent: 16 November 2004 12:44 To: openguides-london@openguides.org Subject: [OpenGuides-London] Adverts on the London site

I see that the London OpenGuide now has Ads by Gooooogle on it. Comments?

Kake

I agree with others that some discusion on the list was warranted.

Can Earle please clarify if Lon.OG has entered into some contractual arrangement with Google, and if so, what the terms and conditions are. If the site was going to give some revenue kick-back, it would be nice to know how this is calculated. Also, is there a penalty for abandoning the adverts if we change our mind (which looks likely from this discussion)?

The ads are quite unobtrusive and I'm not too bothered about them. I'm more bothered about the lack of previous discussion (or even notification) - like some people said, if it's running costs to be dealt with, then fund-raising might raise more. Someone else did point out that the ads are easily blockable on Firefox. Then again, people running Firefox with Adblock are probably in quite a minority. (Firefox users are about 10% on my own site, which is much more than the average, but still a minority).

The alternative is a fork: "The Free guide to London". I'm not sure this would be such a good idea.

I think that would be pretty disastrous - future contributions would be diluted across two sites, and a lot of contributors would probably just choose the free site as it's more "morally acceptable". But then the "free guide" might just come across the same funding troubles as the current site. Better to sort it out at the source.

Dave