Tag Archives: ads

Less Ads, Control Panel, and Other Changes

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I know it’s been awhile since we made any improvement to our site, but life has been busy.

Some of you may have already noticed. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made a bunch of changes to the site. The most noticeable change is probably the removal of a bunch of ads. We’ve also switched from using Project Wonderful to Google Ads. Yes, we’ve switched over to the Evil Empire.

Another change is that our Trailer Library (previously known as All Trailers) when in text mode is displayed in 1 column with no line-wrapping (previously 4 columns). We feel that this design feels neater and much more easier to scroll through to find the movie you want. We’ll probably group them by first letter some time down the road, but for now, this should suffice.

On our individual movie pages, you’ll notice we’ve added 3 new buttons into what we’re calling the control panel. Currently we only have a Play Latest Trailer button, Share on Twitter button, and Share on Facebook button. We have some ideas of what else to add to the control panel later. If you have any ideas, feel free to submit them to the feedback panel by clicking on the feedback on the left.

One additional thing we’ve changed is we now split the trailers from the clips, an often requested change according to our feedback. The trailers and teasers will now show up grouped together followed by the clips grouped together.

We’d like to take this time to thank all our contributors as well as visitors. We appreciate the support you have for us. It would mean a lot to us if you would let your friends know about our site on Twitter, Facebook, or any other way you can think of! 😀

Project Wonderful

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So I’ve gotten around to trying a new ad system: Project Wonderful. I first heard about it on Real Life Comics and decided to look into it. Also the fact that there was some way to get ads into my RSS feeds sounded interesting. I haven’t looked too deep into that yet, but it looks like due to the fact they have code for both <script> and <noscript>, the noscript part can be activated on RSS feeds, so if I inject the code directly into the feed php files, it should theoretically work.

I found many of AdBrite’s flash animation ads to be really annoying, so it wasn’t that difficult a decision to leave them. I still have the footer on AdBrite to compare it against the header which is now using Project Wonderful.

Some cool things about Project Wonderful include:

  • A lot of tweaks (i.e. banner size, text/graphical ads, enable/disable animation, open in new/same window, colors, audience catering, etc.)
  • Ad code that doesn’t necessary need to run JavaScript, so you can place it on RSS feeds.
  • Nice and helpful customer support. Sent an email, got a reply 5 minutes later not with an automated response or someone who doesn’t even bother reading my email, but an actual human telling what I had to do.
  • Once you’re approved, you can post ads on any site that you own. You don’t have to manually request for approval for additional sites.

I also heard about OpenX from my DreamHost newsletter (don’t worry, this site isn’t hosted on DreamHost). I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it sounds like another interesting ad server. If anyone knows about OpenX, please feel free to drop us a line telling us about it. Much appreciated.

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It’s been awhile since I posted about any developments on this site. Work has kept me quite busy.

I’ve been fooling around with ads, as you probably have noticed (unless of course you use AdBlocker). Anyway, I still don’t quite like the layout nor the annoying flashing gif animations. I’ll be experimenting with text only ads and see how they fare. Before you ask me why I’ve opted for AdBrite and not Google Adsense, lets just say that Google Adsense doesn’t like this site for some reason, as my application was rejected without any explanation.

The “All Trailers” link has been moved from the bottom of the index pages to the top to make it more discoverable.

I’ve also received many requests to add a search engine for this site. As always, you were able to search for trailers using the built-in WordPress search engine. I do have plans to write one up and even supporting auto-complete. However for now, I just added a search box in the upper right hand corner that does an in-site search of hd-trailers.net via Google.

Also, there has been a request to label trailers with genre tags, which I’ve begun to. I’ve just been copying genre information from IMDb and adding them to the category list.