Forum ads

[CAD]

Thanks for the feedback and we absolutely appreciate it and feel it’s an important part of running a forum like this. The ideas and comments that have come out over the last few days about the addition of ads on the forum demonstrate how much ClassADrivers means to folks and we don’t want to do anything that fundamentally jeopardizes that.

We agree that the current ad implementation may be a bit much. But let me talk about why we’ve done this. First, however let me apologize for not giving our members a heads up prior to going live with the ads. That was incorrect and we’ll try not to throw surprises like this by you again.

We’ve had a number of companies approach us lately about advertising on the forums. They know this is a good community and they feel their products and services would be relevant to you all. Being in business, this caught our ears. Our primary goal with this forum is to maintain the quality of the community. We believe, however, that advertising is not necessarily in conflict with this. If we can show you offers from companies that are useful to you, we think that advertising can actually add to the quality of the community. Of course, if done poorly, advertising can also destroy the experience and that is not our intention at all. For instance, site loading times should not slow down as a result. We’re looking to fix that.

Unfortunately, because the forum has never had advertising in the past, there was no information on which positions worked best and how much ads could be worth. Because of this, we decided to place some Google ads up to get an idea of placement and performance and to see the relevance of the ads coming through. Over the last few days we’ve gathered a lot of great information and will now act on it.

Over the course of the coming weeks, you’ll see these ad layouts change as we test new ideas and as we bring in advertisers that we feel are relevant to the community. We hope that you keep giving us this honest feedback and that we can get to a place where the community thrives because the content on the pages is interesting and relevant, regardless of whether or not it is paid or free.”