Now THIS Is A Well Targeted Ad Buy

Protip: when selling advertising on your official forums, be careful who you sell it to.

eh-blizz-forum-gold-ads

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 and is filed under Doh, WoW, _. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

#1 by Mercury on January 22nd, 2009

Man, I wish I would have gotten an ad up there. Those gold sellers are relentless…
#2 by Apache on January 22nd, 2009

that’s berry, berry good use of ad space. <3
#3 by Garthilk on January 22nd, 2009

This is EXACTLY why I belive official forums should not have ads. I mean they’re already charging customers for the forums, then making even more money on top of them?
#4 by Trife on January 22nd, 2009

I do agree that the forums shouldn’t have adds. They claim the forums are a bonus service that’s provided for free, which is total bull, considering alot of the bug reporting and technical support is done on the forums.

And they even perma-ban people for things not even listed in the Code of Conduct of the forums, and have no real way to dispute these besides sending emails to the very people who banned you, no talking to supervisers concerning policies, etc. (Personal Experience)

On the bright note, my WoW account is not going to be renewed, disappointed with how blizzard has been handling things anyways.

I know most of the products they advertise are their own WoW products: trading cards, miniatures and the like, which is ok, I’d accept it long as the adds are small and simple and didn’t take you off of blizzard’s site.

Guess you still can’t beat the farmers though.

And ban people for shopping where you pointed them to go, even if it was a mistake.
#5 by VorpalK on January 22nd, 2009

Heh. If I hadn’t dropped that game years ago I still wouldn’t have seen that ad. Firefox + Adblock Plus FTW.

Still, someone needs to be fired for letting that abortion slip through.

I loved Attack of the Show on G4 today. They spoofed a Farmers Only dating site by showing two silly midwest farmer parodies, and then an asian Gold Farmer’s advertisement taped like a dating site intro.
#6 by VorpalK on January 22nd, 2009

BTW this site is whitelisted on the whole adblock thing. until I see flash ads anyhow :0
#7 by UnSub on January 22nd, 2009

Why does Blizzard allow ads on the official WoW forums anyway? I think it is amateur hour when I see them on the Fallen Earth forums, but think it is double amateur hour when I see them on the WoW forums because enough general revenue is coming into Blizzard to make them ad free.
#8 by Scott Jennings on January 22nd, 2009

@VorpalK

I’m not likely to run ads any time soon.

* Cost of keeping the site up is nominal (hi2u internet economy collapse).
* Google Ads (my most likely source) pay literally almost nothing.
* It’s very, very, very difficult to keep gold farming ads off Google Ads.

So given all the above, not worth the hassle.
#9 by Mist on January 22nd, 2009

Supposedly the ads are a by-product of the Activision-Blizzard upper level management.
#10 by Melf_Himself on January 22nd, 2009

Eh, we all know that Blizzard actually owns various gold-farming companies right? Weeeee profit.
#11 by Trife on January 23rd, 2009

@Melf_Himself
I think it would be a good business call. Control the illegal market to be able to control the price and eat up all the profits of this yellow market. Though I’ve considered this a possibility for awhile, I doubt it’s really the case.

Or maybe the programmers secretly sell gold farmers good methods of avoiding detection that Blizz has implemented, such as the mail and auction house payment delays that are implemented, to take in commission or payment for being spys.

Either way, I do hate adds, the blizzard forums actually were the catalyst to cause me to finally get ad-block, usually I generally avoided sites who had overkill on adds, at least flash adds… when I see those, I personally boycott the site… and do it even faster when it has the sound ones. “Your a winner!” Just like the annoying voice that pops up from the mail letter in the Fifth Element.
#12 by Ventris on January 23rd, 2009

Heh, maybe Mythic should take out some ad space.

Something like, “Why WoW when you can WAR!”.
#13 by VPellen on January 23rd, 2009

It’s times like these I’m glad I don’t work for WoW customer support.

Seriously, ouch.
#14 by wowpanda on January 23rd, 2009

Ventris :
Heh, maybe Mythic should take out some ad space.
Something like, “Why WoW when you can WAR!”.

Now we are talking!
#15 by Syncaine on January 23rd, 2009

That ad is probably the most coherent, informative, and useful thing on that site.
#16 by William Purvis on January 27th, 2009

But, that’s not a bad price for gold! j/k