UMD VIP members get several benefits, and also have most of the advertising turned off, in common with many other sites that banish ads when you buy an enhanced membership.

But the UMD ads are very much on-topic and of interest to the users - personally I miss the column of pictures of ever-changing messy women in the side ads when browsing forum threads. It's also handy as an advertiser to see what ads are showing and hence know which ones still have credits and which have run out.

I'd like to request the following:

VIP membership by default banishes the ads that don't link directly to content, but leaves all the ones that do (camera icon underneath) showing. But with options in the user profile to chose "All Ads shown", "Direct Link Only Ads shown", and "No Ads shown".

I've added a bunch of my ad images. Doesn't everyone want sticky wenches (or whatever other preference) in their sidebar?

Weird - when I wrote this post I added a poll to it, which at least one person voted in, but it's now completely vanished?

And now it's back! Ta MM!

DungeonMasterOne, (& MessMaster - as ultimately you're the one in charge...)

Interesting poll, I'm a VIP member, and I must admit it wasn't the "ads" / "no ads" issue that was what got me to become a VIP, but issues like being able to download all photos in a post as a *.ZIP file...

However that said, I would be quite happy to see ads / content which are relevant to me, but I'd really like to see ads which I'm NEVER going to be interested in removed... which in my case could simply be done if all tags had to supply a gender tag... the reason I say this is because when scrolling the "Featured Sites" and "What's New" sections on the front page, even though I am logged in & my account is set to "Female" WAM, I still seem to get ads for "Male" WAM sites. So for example of the 16 sites which can be displayed in the featured sites, I currently have displayed 1x link to "UMD VIP" - fair enough I'm a VIP member and it would interest all WAMmers, 11x links to female WAM sites some of which I may visit & purchase from & 4x adverts for "Male" WAM sites which are of no interest to me & therefore I've manually blocked each picture using the AdBlock Plus Image Blocker for Firefox. That's 25% of available slots wasted which COULD possibly be used to advertise something I don't normally purchase but might be enticed to do if I saw an ad I liked...

Likewise on the "What's New" there are 6 new videos being plugged today, 5x female & 1x male, however this varies by the day an on some days have been a higher number of videos almost entirely male... again, I block the images associated with them...

If there was "smart" gender tagging of adverts, or even a display of adverts based on taste, I might see more that I liked and spend more, and would certainly spend less time sitting blocking images, so I'd be happy to have adverts on UMD Premium, provided they were gender-tagged.

The freedom of choice would be the better VIP perk in my opinion rather than an outright removal of them. I also don't see why anyone would vote any other way. There's no sense in subjecting someone who doesn't want the ads to them, or completely getting rid of them for people who actually want them. If you want them, you can have them. If you don't, you don't need to (so long as you've got a VIP account). It gives the individual a better experience with the site, which can only benefit everyone, right?

Since Simon brought it up, I also think it would be wise to have targeted ads for all accounts, not just VIP ones. For example, my feelings on male WAM range from indifference to disgust, so there is absolutely no point whatsoever in showing me adverts with that kind of content. No matter how well or how often it's advertised, I'm never going to buy it. Being bombarded with irrelevant adverts just reduces interest in the adverts as a whole, and with it their effectiveness goes down.

It's true that some of UMD's ads do blur the line between content and ads. I try to make them as useful and non-annoying as possible, and highlight the ones where content matches the banner or where they have free galleries. The line is blurry on the rest of the site, too: the forums have always blurred the line between advertisement and content, and hell, the entire download store system is one big gallery / ad. So I understand that my principle of not showing ads to upgraded members seems a bit nebulous nowadays. And since the ads are positioned to never obscure or pre-empt content in the first place, removing them as an annoyance factor probably isn't even that much of a VIP perk. So I'll keep an eye on your very useful poll... even though you did bait people with pics!

By the way, the option to select a level of ads would be ideal, but sadly the overhead on server resources would be too much for that option right now. The way I see it right now is they're all or nothing.

Messmaster

Point taken. I've been working on targeted ads for months, but they've been on the backburner for technical reasons. Our ads are all generated ahead of time and stored as code blocks. To individualize the ads would put us into realtime ad generation, which our server can't handle... because it's not Google. Keeping accurate stats and caching pages for speed are two things that are completely at odds with each other, and making them individualized can make it exponentially worse, unless I program it a completely different way. So yeah... backburner. Maybe I should just go with an outside advertising agency, but I don't trust them for privacy reasons.

A couple of days ago I suddenly had all the sidebar ads back, due to having not posted any pics in a few days I'd dropped out of the honorary VIP status back to regular user - and TBH it seemed to me at least an improvement, there was more wam on my screen when browsing.

Good points from The Saint and VanillaXSlime regarding appropriate targeting though. Personally I'm not bothered by the sight of male wam - and nude wam of any kind is of no interest to me so chances are I've already mentally skipped over any images with penises in simply because they aren't fully clothed, but I can see that to someone who's primary interest is nude female wam and who is repelled by male nakedness, they could be more disruptive - that person mentally filters out all the clothed images, then starts to focus in on the naked ones (exact reverse of what I do), and then half way focussed notices that the image has a penis in it.

And of course the exact reverse for people who are only into nude male wam and find vaginas objectionable.

From a purely personal POV as a producer I'd definitely like to be able to toggle the ads back on when I have VIP status though. Partly because I like to see the images, and have occasionally bought other people's scenes based on them, and partly because being a bit OCD about my coding I like to sometimes click my own ads (without costing credits, which means having to be logged into the UMD, which means the ads vanish if I'm VIP) just to double-check that the associated links are working correctly and that potential customers are being directed to the actual scenes the ads are for (just in case I break something on my own servers without noticing, which has happened occasionally). So all-or-nothing is fine for me, non-relevant ones get mentally skipped.

Interesting info about how they are generated - I'd assumed the ad images lived in a set of static directories as jpgs, with each one's metadata and image URL stored in the DB, and then the UMD code simply did a random selection when generating each page and banged the image urls into the src attribute of the img tags as it went. That would also allow for including the appropriate sites' descriptions (pulled from the metadata) as the alt text on each one, boosting SEO. But I'm guessing there's a speed / caching advantage in having them as pre-built blobs in the DB instead?

Intel has a reasonably priced 10-core/20-thread Xeon chip now. Two of those in one chassis and you'd be in artificial intelligence territory


Oh HELL naw! But for different reasons. If anyone gave a shit about privacy, Facebook wouldn't exist It's the constant stream of mallware and viruses that come from 3rd-party ad brokers that should concern everyone. I've been running Adblock+ and NoScript since the day they were invented and I absolutely would not set foot on the open web without them.