Remove third-party advertising networks from the website

[Lion pet 0]

Patreon revenue alone (150$/month, has been higher) pays for hosting (37€/month) and since PC Gaming Wiki is "non-profit" and run entirely by volunteers I would very much prefer modern ad networks to be completely removed from the website.

Affiliate links are fine and I presume that are the largest single source of revenue as well.

 

The ad networks don't curate or verify the ads their customers want to run and malware occasionally spreads via internet advertising, in addition to obvious personal data exposure. PCGW uses at least doubleclick.net.

[Andytizer 268]

Can you show me examples of ads on PCGW that run malware? If this has been run through our advertising partner then I will bring it up with them. Also, ads are disabled for logged-in users.

 

Affiliate links generate very little income. We also have additional costs which you might not be aware of:

• Licensing IP Board
• Development of the IP Board/MediaWiki bridge (which will need to be contracted out again so that it'll work with current IPB4/MW versions) - our current quote for this is $850+
• Server admin contractor costs (new development)
• Rental of secondary server for IP Board/assignments system/other projects
• Additional server for off-site backups
• Load balancing and spinup of additional servers during high load
• Other previous costs such as the professional animation we used for the advertisement and Patreon videos, as well as payment for the VO artist to narrate both videos
• Purchase of a large number of games for contributors to write PC Reports/wiki articles
• Purchase of a large amounts of gift cards for contributors (in previous anniversaries)

We rely on volunteers to keep article pages up to date, however PCGamingWiki has never stated that it's a non-profit organisation. Advertisements are my compensation as founder of the website and for the substantial investment of time. This was especially true at the time of founding where I spent thousands of hours building, marketing and developing features for the site to get to the critical mass where it is now.