Call me crazy, but… Ads

Adding some form of ads, to increase the sites revenue.
What problem(s) would this feature solve?
The extra revenue would allow for issues such as small storage and other common limits to be increased for free, while not killing the site.
Explain what you were trying to do when you came across the problem leading to this feature request
I’ve seen a lot of people not like the new limits in place on the website. While ads are annoying, passive ads wouldn’t be intrusive, and could allow for limits on free users to be increased.

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While this would really suck for most users, it’s honestly a good idea IMO (or at least for a test/temporary means of revenue). Providing an alternative means of revenue, and if ads were to be disabled in paid plans, it would give users more of a reason to upgrade.

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Maybe TL 3 or 4 to remove ads?

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increasing mainsite revenue with ads is unfeasible. How would decide when an ad plays, it’s an IDE not a video player. If you’re talking about this forum, there are very few active users and there is already a plugin. Finally, don’t ad block by TL @NateDhaliwal. That’s generally not a good ide

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I have a second thought to add, as an excellent point is if this would be on the main website, or the forums, or both. I originally had the idea that this would Best effect only the main website, due to: The higher traffic, and the fact that most users of replit don’t even know about the forums.
I also was thinking that if ads were added, they wouldnt be video ads. They just suck, no matter the reasoning.

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ide means integrated development environment

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No, i thought you meant ‘idea’.

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ok I see your point but … you really can’t. Where would you put it? replit is intensely compact with possibly even too many features. Putting ads in community would generate a small amount of revenue but people barely use that functionality of replit nowadays. Instead, the most amount of “views” of a social function from replit would be from the forum even though it has less traffic cuz it’s got more webviews.

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Yeah, video ads of any kind would be horrendous. Ads would have to be limited to the main site home or community page, and not the IDE, or it would be impossible to develop. Ghostwriter popups are already fairly annoying, imagine if a whole window with an ad was taking half the workspace.

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it wouldn’t be impossible but they would also generate an insanely small amount of money since ppl barely spend time staring at their homepage. In addition, in editor ads are not feasible

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Putting ads in the IDE was not what I had exactly imagined, as yes, it would be intrusive in an already cramped space. I was just trying to think of a way to deal with the financial issues that result in free accounts being heavily limited.

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I agree with this, but it would be the only way to provide ads that don’t cause huge amounts of backlash. It’s still revenue though, even if it’s a small increase. They could even implement a script to prevent adblockers, so they could try to get as much revenue out of the little advertising as possible.

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Do ads really not generate that much revenue? I’m under the impression now that they make much less than I initially thought.

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ads are gonna be generating revenue based on how long they are viewed and by how many people. If you pop on the homepage for 1 second and go to a repl, you’ve viewed a singular ad for 3% of it’s viewtime. That’s gonna be very little normally unless you have a lot of people I guess, also it depends on demographic (it’s very little for a corporate entity*)

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Ok, I wasn’t aware that they needed to be viewed for the whole ad to generate proper revenue. That does reduce this ideas value by a lot.

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I mean they probably don’t need to view the whole ad (idk about ads very much) but sure, you can get like the revenue from one ad for an hour long coding session. Compare that to youtube where you get like the revenue from 5 for 8 minutes

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Great idea, but as has been said, it wouldn’t bring in much income as most people are in the workspace.
However, home page, cover page and community ads would be fine for non Hacker or Pro users.
Additionally, maybe being able to spend 500 cycles per month to disable ads.

I’m not an expert on ads, but I believe that revenue is generated per-click (when not a video ad). So, if Replit advertised other coding platforms then they’d get a lot more engagement than random ads from Adsense (or similar platform).
This also applies to video-ads, but for TrueView ads (the ones you can skip) it also takes into account if and when the user skips it. So the advertiser doesn’t pay for a TrueView ad that is immediately skipped.

So, why did I say all that? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Basically, although it’s not much revenue, if they do well with targeting it and putting it in obstructive yet not too annoying places they could get a decent amount of money probably.
TrueView & video ads before running a cover page repl that isn’t your own seems reasonable to me (like on YT before watching videos) for a free service.
They just shouldn’t be too common and destroy the platform.

Would need a lot of planning to do this properly.
And never give ads to paying users.

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Wdyt? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

(To be absolutely clear – these mocks are a joke)
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I personally believe that it should be fair for everyone.

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Oh dear, anything but Grammarly ads :weary:

(Don’t take this seriously, only a joke)

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