Sites with advertising

Jon D. Miller

New member
I am presently a vbulletin customer that stumbled upon XF as I am not interested in vb4 as its quite buggy. My site is hawkeyenation.com/forum and I have quite a bit of advertising on my site, some local and some third party networks. I also have a sports publishers consulting biz where I help pubs maximize their third party ad revs...so XF could be a wide spread solution.

How does XF interact with ad networks? The XF communities I have examined have not been ad heavy...can you place ads after the first post in threads? footer areas? Many of my ads are outside the forum template and in general design areas, but some are in the forums. Thanks for any feedback, or links to sites that are running XF and also have ads.
 
As far as ads go, yes, I use adverts on guests with one after the first post in each thread (message template & conditionals) and sidebar advertising. The theme has ad template too.
 
There are lots of ad templates which can be used to display ads.

Check the online demo and search for ad_ in the template system.

Or you can create your own templates and insert them wherever you like.

Admin Demo
 
Jon having good advertising potential is a requirement for me too when moving from vB, and from what I've seen from established XenForo forums this isn't going to be a problem. One great feature with XF compared to the stock vB3 is the sidebar on the main page. This has potential to easily drop adverts in, plus the "Staff online" can be tweaked (or added to) with "Sponsors online" too, which is a very powerful way of highlighting on-line sponsors, better than the vB way of user group mark up in the "who's online?" list.
 
Now that is a brilliant idea!

Amusingly, when that was suggested over at IPB it was laughed off the forum by their regulars (and staff). Why on earth would you want a Staff online block they smirked? I don't know about anyone else but when I first saw XenForo, I thought the staff on-line was a brilliant idea, really made the user feel part of the community and to know who the staff were - and then when it could be tweaked for sponsors and other user groups, even better.
 
That's how different views are. I find the "staff online" box to one of more unfortunate features of XF. One issue is that it's now totally obvious when there's no staff online. This can have a negative impact on user perception a la "no staff online, folks who run this forum clearly don't give a **** about it".

Another issue is that the folks listed in staff online will inevitably become the lightning rod of real-time forum drama. Instead of using the report function people will just PM the staff member that's currently online, likely leading to burn out on the staff member's part.

Sometimes staff is online on their own time, just participating in the forum like a normal user not in staff capacity. The "staff online" paints a really big bullseye on your staff and I will be damned if I let that happen to my people.

Sponsors Online on the other hand is a good idea if those members want to be part of that box.
 
This can have a negative impact on user perception a la "no staff online, folks who run this forum clearly don't give a **** about it".
To be fair, it depends on the time of day.

Sure, if its peak time and there are no mods on, it looks bad. If its 2am and no mods are on, that's different.

Comes down to how many staff you have though and whether you have the right ones at the end of the day.

Good point about the lightening rod effect though, I guess we'll just have to monitor it.

That said, we have our mods highlighted in Green in the 'Who's online' box anyway, so its pretty obvious as it currently stands.
 
How does XF interact with ad networks? The XF communities I have examined have not been ad heavy...can you place ads after the first post in threads? footer areas? Many of my ads are outside the forum template and in general design areas, but some are in the forums. Thanks for any feedback, or links to sites that are running XF and also have ads.

Hi Jon, and welcome to XenForo, :)

To answer your question about ads and XenForo:

I am currently working on an Ad Manager with the following features:

- Ad displayed per thread id
- Ad displayed per node id (forum id, page id, child nodes)
- Each of the 19 ad locations included in XenForo can be set to display to all groups or specific groups
- Ads placed in threads can be set to only display in the first post, last post, first post of each page, or last post of each page
- Scripted ads (Google adsense for example), JS (clocks, timers, etc), HTML, and banners are supported
- Each ad (packet) can contain multiple ads, consisting of any combination listed above and can be all displayed at once or one at a time utilizing JQuery.
- You can select how long each ad will display before another replaces it
- Each ad location can be set to keep track of views, clicks and display time

There are no template edits required. Just install the add-on, and create your adpack for display.
 
I'm interested in the same capability as the OP. Lawrence, when will your add on be available? And without it, is there any other way to achieve the same results?

Hi, and welcome to XenForo, :)

With respect to served ads, you can easily have XenForo accomplish what you need with a couple of simple template edits. When it comes to sponsors ads, template edits won't do, code modifications will be required if you wish for sponsors ads to be rotated through with other ads.

The ad manager I am currently working on will require no template edits. Currently it supports all 19 XenForo ad locations (3 in the sidebar), and I am looking at adding a couple of more including the footer and page background. It will also allow you to choose where ads show within threads (ie: first post, last post, etc.), and allow you to display multiple ads at the same time in each ad location. It supports served ads, sponsors ads (banners), JavaScript, and HTML.

As for the release date, it is useable now, but I want to finish a few details before I release it for testing.
 
These ad placements are far better than vBulletin's I assure you, you won't find a side-bar ad placement in vBulletin. Not one you can control, anyway. You can have a box around your ad, or you can do without....you can decide to use sidebar ads only on mainpage, or on postbits themselves.
 
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