Traffic might be high.. but quality went down hill long ago so we had to stop using the banners. The empty banner spaces around the forum are testament to that really. There are a number of reasons for this, many of which I and others have pointed out to the ad team here in the past, but they were never properly addressed from what I can see, it was usually a "but engagement is up etc etc" or "perhaps it's your creatives" which might well be the case.. but that engagement being up is from broke people looking to make $5 a day, it's not from buyers with money anymore.
On top of that if you look at the banners on the left hand side of the forum, when you scroll down in a sub-forum to the bottom of the thread list - those banners are below the thread list due to all the other options on the left side, so they're running alongside what is basically a huge black space that no one is EVER scrolling down to look at - that's wasted money on an advertisers part IMO.
Then you've got most people now running ad-blockers (not bhw's fault this one). The site-wide sticky you see across all sub-forums used to be a great placement when it was run for only one or two people, done manually back then. When they introduced the rotating text allowing numerous people to use it when the forum upgrade happened ad-blockers were then able to tell it's also an ad and not just a forum site-wide announcement like before, such a shame as it was probably one of the best placements the forum had ROI wise.
We keep a small piece of advertising here now, which is one sticky thread in the link building section, even that isn't great since they began allowing 15+ threads to be sticky, the good old days of it being max 6 threads and ACTUALLY STANDING OUT are gone. However as it stands with the market place being so over-crowded the stickies are a necessity.
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