Advertising and Adoptable Sites

Yeah, I know it's been a while since I last posted. I tried several times, but I guess I was posting at peak times and the server wouldn't add my post (after half an hour of trying each time). Anyway, hopefully today's post will upload.

My first topic today is advertising. It's everywhere these days, and many websites subsist only upon the revenues from advertising. Understandably, advertisers want to get their name into the heads of consumers, and some advertisers seem to think that annoying people is the best way to do this. While I admit that it's a good way to get people to say, "I'll never buy or support *insert the name of company with a horrible ad like Quiznos or Geico*", I can't see how that does the company a service. With Internet ads, some advertisers seem to think that they have to make flashing ads to get people to pay attention to the ad. I've got a newsflash for them. First, flashing ads, which are detrimental to certain health problems, make many people disable all ads just to get around them. Second, flashing ads cause complaints to webmasters who then must manually block the offensive ads. Third, people do pay attention to ads if they have something meaningful to say. Most web surfers know to ignore the "Click here for your free Wii" and "You are the 1 millionth visitor, click here for your prize!" ads. They are little more than scams. Since many websites gain a limited pool of advertisements, most regulars on any given site have seen ads for a game before. Making a new ad that flashes just annoys people (there's a reason that HTML no longer supports the BLINK tag), and makes people want to avoid your website. In short, stop making annoying ads, inappropriate ads, and idiotic ads. People are numb to stupid tactics companies concoct to get their money, and an ad that annoys someone is more likely to drive them away than bring them in.

Now on to my second topic, which is only tenuously connected to the first: Adoptable sites. (Adoptables are, in themselves, a form of advertisement for the website that distributes them.) These seem to be the fad of the year, with new ones cropping up regularly and a pre-made script or two being distributed for use by anyone with the inclination to do so. Everyone seems to have their own way of encouraging players to click other adoptables on their site such as: paying site-specific currency (ex: Valenth, Whimpsters), giving random site rewards (ex: DragonAdopters, UniCreatures), giving out exclusive adoptables (PokePlushies, Virtuadopt), listing those who have clicked on one's adoptables that day (ex: Global Pokedex Plus), and some sites have no incentive at all (ex: Dragon Cave and Arvyre, as well as all the other sites using the same cookie-cutter code that Arvyre uses). Of all of these methods, I'd have to say that none of them seem to be especially effective. There is another option that many adoptable site players use: Click/Link exchanges. These exchanges give click for click. If you click on another's adoptable, you eventually get a click in return from someone else. There are downsides to these systems also, such as the resources required to run them. In short, it seems that no adoptable website I've seen has managed to solve the problems with making adoptables more interactive without rewarding unwanted behavior (like spamming or leeching).

~Quag

PS: The idea of adoptables is not really new. My first computer graphics projects over 10 years ago were animating "adoptable" Care Bear images, but the adoptables were nothing more than HTML image links back then. There was no "leveling" involved, primarily because it was very expensive to purchase a hosting package that allowed the user access to the kind of server-side programming needed to give adoptable images levels and names.