| Advertising On YMMV |
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YMMV offers aggressive advertising rates which are designed to make Web advertising simple, straightforward, and profitable for you. Some sites charge as much as 10 cents per page view, but ours are much less! And, because the material featured in YMMV is designed to appeal to an educated, computer-literate audience, it's more likely that those hits will come from discriminating, serious potential buyers. Many sites charge for advertising by counting the number of "hits" on the page where the ad appears, then multiplying by a CPM (or "cost per thousand"). (Note: While the letter "M" is used to mean 1024x1024, or sometimes one million, in the computer world, it means a thousand -- as it does in a Roman numeral -- in the advertising world.) Unfortunately, with this system, it's hard to estimate what your final advertising cost could be. If a site posts a particularly popular story or happens to appear in a "hot list" of selected Web sites, you might get a huge "surprise" bill at the end of the month! What's more, sites count impressions differently, so comparing rates can be like comparing apples to oranges. YMMV avoids this problem by setting simple, flat rates for all advertising. Placing an ad with us is as simple as putting a classified ad in your local newspaper: you know what you're paying, for what service, when you place the ad. Because we don't have to do billing after the fact, we can price aggressively. We base our prices on the number of page views we had during the previous two weeks, multiplied by a cost per view that's well below the industry average. (For example, you'll pay about 3 cents per view for a quarter banner at the top of the page -- not the industry-standard 10 cents.) Again, you'll know exactly how much you will pay for the ad at the time you place it; no surprises! If you pay for multiple insertions (up to 4 weeks at a time), you can pay for all of them at the current rate. Even though we expect our hits to increase, you'll get the extra exposure for free if you pay in advance. Your ad doesn't alternate with others; the "real estate" is yours! Every
visitor sees it. (How would you like it if only 50% of the readers of a
newspaper saw your classified ad?) Your ad is a full-fledged part of the
page during the time when it runs. So, it loads fast. There's no
overhead due to CGI scripts, server-side includes, "ad servers," or complex
Java applets. (On other sites, users may encounter long delays as their
browsers run off to get an ad from elsewhere on the Net.) This decreases
the likelihood that a user will be frustrated by long load times or move
on before he or she sees the ad. We program a static image size for the
ad into the page, so the browser can compose the page immediately -- again,
sparing users an unnecessary wait.
YMMV's educated, literate users are busy people. They'll take time to read your ads, but do not want to be distracted by images which take a long time to load, which flash at them, or which consume computer power to create animations. Therefore, in deference to reader preferences, we do not run ads that are animated GIFs. This sets us apart from other sites, and makes readers feel comfortable and at home; they're therefore more willing to give your button or banner a click. If we receive an animated GIF from an advertiser, we always display the last frame of the animation unless instructed to do otherwise. We offer several styles of ads. Because it's the "entrance" to our site and should be readable with little or no scrolling, the main YMMV page has only a single quarter-banner ad at the top, plus a maximum of four buttons -- two in each column. A quarter-banner is 234x30 pixels -- one quarter of the area of a standard 468x60 banner. (That's big enough to catch the reader's interest, but not so big as to seem like a nuisance or turn readers off.) A "button" is the industry-standard 88x31 pixels. On other pages of the site, we offer three kinds of ads: Interstitial 234x60 or 341x60 half- or three quarter-banners (which are interspersed with the content), buttons (in the left margin), and boxes (also in the margin, in multiples of the standard button size). We limit interstitial ads to three per page, so that readers do not feel that ther reading is interrupted too frequently. Because ads may be confused with editorial content, we reserve the right to place the word "advertisement" adjacent to them. We ask that all ads be static GIFs that are normalized to the standard
Netscape 6x6x6 "color cube." (We will process the image for you, if you'd
like, at no extra charge; such a deal!) This prevents color palette overrun,
which can make your ad look unattractive on some users' screens. No GIF
may be larger than 10K bytes, and all must have "Alt" text conveying an
accurate description of the image. (If you don't include "Alt" text, we
reserve the right to supply text that we create.)
All ad prices are quoted for 7-day periods. You may lock in a price by paying for up to 4 consecutive periods in advance. Relative positions of interstitial ads and/or ads in margins may change from day to day or from week to week unless special arrangements are made. Our current ad prices have been reduced even more than usual to encourage the placement of ads. They are: Home page quarter banner, YMMV: $250 Home Page button, YMMV: $75 Daily Links interstitial half or three quarter banner in text (we allow up to 3 per page): $250 Daily Links Margin Button: $50 (or multiple for boxes taller than 31 pixels) Brett Glass to the Rescue Home Page: Interstitial banners and margin buttons same as for Daily Links. Please note that we do not carry advertising over into archived material, including Daily Links pages more than three days old. Full amount due must be paid, and the GIF supplied and approved,
three days prior to the first date the ad will run. (If you'd like us to
do color normalization or color palette reduction for you, allow two more
days.) By submitting an ad, you agree that our total liability to you for
errors, omissions, or any other claim arising from the transaction is limited
to a refund of the money you paid for the most recent week-long insertion.
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