We started off the hosting service almost a decade ago with banner ads on member pages. Through the decade, banner ads obviously became less effective and less popular. Now we seem to be at a cross roads where pop-ups (and even layered ads) are going out of favor. Each has its own cons:

Pop-ups
- Might be annoying to some users
- Pop-ups are seen as something very negative these days
- Can in very few cases malfunction and pop-up more then once (especially with frames)

Text-Link/Banner Footer Ad
- Can mess up some website designs
- Adds code to your website where a pop-up is on top of your website and doesn't interfere with your code.
- Makes your site look unprofessional by having a webhost banner in it
- Doesn't work with frames or iframes at all.

What do you guys think? Should we start moving away from layered ads and do some text/banner footer ads?

Testing the new text footer right now. It looks very much like the current one:


I'm doing a quick 12-24 hour test to see if it's a viable option to replace pop-ups. If it works, we can say goodbye to the pop-ups that everyone has been complaining about for almost a decade Please let me know how it looks on your page. The text link ad should be content driven and be based on the content of your site (although that part of it is still experimental).

Well the layered ads weren't doing too bad.. they were only being blocked 25% of the time. In any case, the initial readings on the text link look good. It's making only twice less then pop-ups, and I can make up most of the difference with the new 404 page. I need another 24 hours of data before I can make a decision, but it looks like we will soon be getting rid of the pop-ups!

Put Adbrite on the free sites with inline and full page Ads on!
LOL just kidding

Text link stats didn't come in as high as I was expecting. I'm trying to add another text link into the mix and I will be removing the pop-ups for a test later tonight.

Wow!!!    that's the best news that you can give me thank you very much the text ads work very well for me, and again thank you 

Hooray!
I think I love you, Alex.

Thanks guys! Hopefully this will increase daily sign ups a little bit. Purely numbers speaking, we need to almost double our daily-active-members to get revenue back to what it was with pop-ups.