After powering up my PC and loading my home page i was greeted with a rather weird sight. Gone was the familiar purple of the bit-tech site instead it was replaced with a full page ad for medal of honour airborne. Why? Is the almighty bit-tech in some form of special advertising partnership? /edit: RTT
Oh, common... Its an advert for a game, on a nerd infested forum full of gamers... At least its not that annoying buzzing fly. I think it looks fine. I quite like the black in fact.
It's a high-profile advertising campaign ahead of Medal of Honor: Airborne's release next week. It is not "just a clever way to get back at all those who use FF and adblock+ to make web surfing a more pleasurable experience?" As has been repeated dozens of times, advertising pays the bills around here. I would suggest that an Interweb without bit-tech.net would not be a particularly pleasurable web surfing experience. If readers choose to run Adblock, we ask that they please add www.bit-tech.net to their Whitelist and feel free to click an ads that interest them. If people take the p*** and block all our ads, then you risk the following things happening: 1) We are forced to make up for lost revenue by adding advertising that people definitely don't want, like IntelliTXT sponsored keywords, pop-unders etc 2) We retaliate with code, blocking any user who uses AdBlock 3) We close bit-tech.net because we can't pay the bills. Just as you wouldn't want Channel 4 to close down because people use PVRs to skip ads, please don't block the ads on our site.
It doesn't look too bad, but it does make bit-tech lose some of it's uniqueness... Alltough advertising like this is nicer than popups and other nastyness... As long as it fits (which it does) and is tastefull I'm ok with it.
I really wouldn't mind except for the fact that the front page is now about 1.3MB (Well, that's how far it got before I got bored waiting for it to finish and closed it). Basicly I won't bother going there on a regular basis untill it's not hugely fat anymore, sorry. I just don't enjoy sites like that on a 512kb/s connection. I've never used opera to block bit-techs adverts, and I don't intend to start, so I really hope this bloatyness doesn't become a regular feature.
I kind of like it. A game, on a technology forum? Makes sense. All the ads seem to be tasteful and lead to computer related things. I really don't mind to be honest.
Reminds me of the full-page Office 2007 ad on the MSN homepage. Doesn't bother me in the slightest tbh, I never block ads as they're there for a purpose, and sometimes they'll be selling something I might actually want. <A88>
I have to say it does look nicely done, tastefull but not in our face, like so many other ad's online, I rather the front page get a bit o sparkle than having to deal with pop-ups! Looks smooth and not out of place
Just out of interest. Do they make it to fit your page or just hand you a load of assets and tell you to go nuts?
Despite the fact I know G would never, ever do pop ups, if it ever happened I'd go upstairs and hack everyone to death. Twice.
- While I totally understand Bit's reliance on advertising revenue, I've found the flash adverts over the last year or so to be quite over the top. (Though you guys obviously can't really do much about it..) As an example, courtesy of Opera's cack Flash implementation, the Bit-tech front page currently takes between 10-50% of my CPU time. That is what I'd call excessive...
I like the new banner, it breaks up the page, and you find your self on the first page longer, and not just clicking 'Forum' as soon as it loads, meaning more people will see the adds, as well as the articles and news pages Prehaps more special edition front pages are needed. Sam