What the h*ll is going on with Bit-Tech???

The Dennis Ad staff are hurting the site a lot more

 

Shutting up...

Before I get myself kicked....

 

Have to agree with above, If the ads wasn't so in your face I wouldn't mind I would even click on them to help out but this latest campaign ads are really unacceptable and really intrusive.

I would have thought they are turning more people away from bt than anything else.

 

So I log onto Bit-Tech to see what's happening today... Get three lines into an article and WHAM!

It seems the Dennis Ad department B*STARDS are at work again. Despite the rather obvious strong sentiment last time, we are apparently back to full screen adverts that fly in and ***** all over your monitor and stop you from viewing the website you've come to see. And this time the advert is so SH*TTILY made it took me a couple of seconds to figure out my computer wasn't being attacked by something.

Ha ha ha... I remember Simon promising that feedback had been listened to and this type of advert wouldn't be used again... Ha ha ha... Trust Bit-Tech's reviews and articles? We can't even trust their Editor!

What a bunch of losers.

 

You can't trust the reviews anymore because they don't exist

 

LoL... The dearth has been going on for a bit too long now. Honestly? I think Dennis is letting BT starve because it isn't seeing enough revenue for it to keep it going. CPC likely doesn't exactly make millions, but at least it has to be bought to see the content, and it can still be filled with ads anyway.

I initially thought it very strange and unworkable for two products owned by the same company to attempt to go their own ways and report on the same stuff in different manners - whichever way you look at it, this is a duplication of data and not exactly efficient. I stopped my sub to CPC 'cos it just stopped doing what it used to do best, and without making a conscious decision to, I don't look on BT much anymore, cos, well, it hasn't done much to keep me coming back really...

Apart from the odd, tearing-out-ball-hair frustrating full screen adverts, mostly BT doesnt elicit any other emotion than a 'meh', or perhaps a 'oh, I see... {that's} like that, is it?' before I click straight off and look at another site instead for more content.

EDIT: Although Joe's articles are updated fairly regularly. I must give him that.

 

I usually give the reviews a quick read but only to see if they agree with the rest of the internet. Most other sites have reviews out at least 3 days before BT does so I have gone elsewhere as I am sure many others do.

I wish that the site would just split the forum out, people would still come here for hardware help but the forum wouldn't be lumbered with the failing review / news side.

The news articles are usually posted after someone else had posted the topic and the conversation had been finished only to be rehashed in the article comments.

 

As always, thanks for the (mainly) constructive comments here. They all help. Myself and the team are fully aware that there are things that need to be done here, and that they're not happening as quickly as we'd like. I don't want to over-promise, as I've learned the hard way this year that life can get in the way of things a little, but just that your continued support is appreciated, not taken for granted, and won't be wasted.

Simon

 

Maybe you should think about what you're saying and to whom. Your full screen advert appears to have been a one off random event. Having a go at Simon isn't going to help anything. He doesn't control the Dennis marketing department, if they choose to put certain types of ads on here, he can't really do much except express our disdain. Even then, they don't have to listen.

 

I think it's its somewhat unfair to lay the blame at simons feet he can only do so much, Although I have to say what I've witnessed recently on bt is disappointing to say the least, Some serious lack of good judgement makes me wonder what really goes on behind the scene.

It's obvious that Dennis is only interested in profit and couldn't care less about the loyal members of the forum, I believe the rot has set in and is being compounded by the bad decisions that have been made.

R.I.P bit-tech

 

I'd just like to echo what Tel and Noiz have stated above one more time. If my memory serves me correctly (and it often doesn't so I'm prepared to be corrected), Simon is not even directly employed by Dennis Publishing, but is rather on a rolling contract to edit Bit-tech.net and act as a central point for organising and editing the content of the site. Thus he had no direct say in what Dennis Publishing, the owners of the site, choose to do over and above that. He will also no doubt be given a budget with which to pay the contributors to the site, and I'd guess that the budget goes up and down depending on the advertising revenue Dennis see from the site.

Not to say that anyone is doing anything wrong by posting in here, as Pook said it's a feedback forum and this is feedback. Just try to keep the personal attacks and unpleasantness to a minimum.

My personal take is that a lot of posters on here - myself included - are keen to support Bit by allowing the ads to be displayed on the main site and even sometimes clicking on relevant ones, but the complaints are firmly being levied at adverts that intrude on one's overall experience of the site. Or completely irrelevant ads. I honestly don't care if the main site tries to sell me stuff, but I draw the line at advertising in the forums. I don't know how much a forum of this size and age costs to host and administer, but I'll hazard a guess that most people have ad blockers turned on if their conversations are being interrupted every few minutes.

My tuppence (again )

 

Wise words, seconded.

 

To be honest I've nearly given up on bit-tech. However, I recently joined the GalaxyNexusForum [just got myself a nexus] and something immediately caught my eye; the forum is set up such that when you are a guest (IE not signed in) the forums are absolutely filled with skim links and those awful ad choice (not to be confused with google's addchoices) hover links [where your cursor passes over the underlined word and you get an small on screen flash popup right over the word].

Normally, I would have instantly been driven away from the forum, but I wanted to check out some of the attachments so I created an account. To my surprise all of the skimlinks and ad choice advertisements disappeared from the forum. Even the adds that were sprinkled in between the posts were gone. All that was left was 2 banner adds at the top, and a single "sponsors" advertisement at the bottom of the page. I thought to myself, "Now this is livable!"

As a visitor, the forum has adds like crazy, and they seem to be more than enough to placate even the most insatiable advertising department. HOWEVER!! Almost all the adds disappeared when you logged into the site. From the main page, to the forums, all that was left was a couple of banner adds. No annoying full screen advertisements, no skimlinks, no ad choice flash words, no videos, no noisy flashy adds of death. Just a couple of peaceful, relevant, and non obtrusive advertisements.

This definitely seems like a compromise that could keep the masses happy. Now to be clear I'm suggesting limited deployment of all those adds we hate, skimlinks, ad choice, whatever; sure go ahead and go to town with your pop-ups and noise flash adds that incite mass genocide. But for the love of all that is good and machinable, clear the adds out of the site for the members!!! I can do with the banner add at the top, and even one at the bottom as long as they are relevant and not causing my eyes to melt from their sockets.

I know it's possible as I have now seen it in action, heck the GalaxyNexusForum is even running vBulletin for their forum/site, so we can't be too far off from having a similar setup.

 

Just a little feedback on the ads:

I haven't had any of the full-screen nasties for a good few days, and the frequency of the banner ad across the bottom of screen has dropped to a much more acceptable level.

I'm hoping this is due to Simon's 'behind the scenes' machinations rather than a serendipitous fluke of surfing on my part.

 

In fact, with E3 news I count 19 unique news stories in the past seven days

 

Appreciating the historical problems, and not wanting to shatter the illusion, but I work very closely with Dennis, and there's no masterplan at all to bring down Bit-Tech. Quite the contrary. The criticism gets very closely listened to, and while it's not always obvious, I accept, there's a strong bunch of people back in Dennis' offices who work very hard on the site, and care a great deal for it.

The problem is that there's a dedicated ads team, specific to Bit-Tech, and then broader campaigns that come from elsewhere within Dennis, and go across lots of sites. It's the latter that are the cause of the complaints here, and there's a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes. The campaigns do work, else they wouldn't run, but there's inevitably a discussion about at what cost.

There's some terrific and very constructive feedback here, and conversations are taking place a lot about the site. With regards Spreadie's point, I had nothing to do with the full screen ad disappearing. That's someone within Dennis spotted the problem, and fixed it, I suspect. That's, in recent weeks, how things have been resolved.

That all said, I know we've still got a lot of work to do here on the site, but we're in here fighting to make it as good as we can, with getting the number of reviews up being my next priority (my first, by large consensus when I joined, was bringing in more news, and getting modding content back to the front of the site. With thanks to Gareth and Antony, that's been done).

Thanks again for all your comments,

Simon

 

I stand corrected and apologise for the comment. I have edited my post to reflect this.

 

Steady on, everyone... I posted this:

"Ha ha ha... I remember Simon promising that feedback had been listened to and this type of advert wouldn't be used again... Ha ha ha... Trust Bit-Tech's reviews and articles? We can't even trust their Editor!"

... the only thing that was directly related to Simon. And within that, all I said was 'We can't even trust the Editor'... And if promised responses are broken more than once (no matter whose fault it actually is), then surely it is reasonable to question the reliability of said persons responses? It's not like a launched on some vile, personal attack on Simon... The ad department are another matter, but then if all of a sudden I'm the only one who thinks they step out of line then I'm a monkey's uncle.

To reiterate, all I actually said was it was hard to trust Simon's responses to advertising feedback, so please get back in your box everyone...