The advertising change has been made for some fairly realistic financial reasons: I want to spend more time on the site, but I cannot justify the time spent on it at present as it is earning near its cost base. The cost of operating the website has been steadily rising and I need to cover off another substantial increase in costs I'm expecting in electricity in the near future given the recent changes in wholesale rates. RTT consumes around 13A of (renewable) power fairly consistenly and I think we've all seen the recent increases in electricity costs. The advertising revenue up to now has covered off the cost of operating the site and some of the salaries of the jobs that the site supports. The remainder has been covered off by taking an excessive amount of consultancy work on various things. However, in summary, this means that it isn't self sustaining and therefore as a going concern poses a risk.
I also need to cover off the fact that I could be doing something else with my life and earning a significant amount more than I currently do in a different industry... so the alternative is shutting everything down. I don't particularly want to do that, but there is a need to get realistic with the fact I'd like to achieve some more personal life goals.
Therein resulted in some extremely long discussions with various publisher advert companies. These have been going on for almost 3 months while we worked out the right way forward internally and, frankly, we still don't know what it is. My preference was to go for some trials with a few companies to see what was possible. As part of that, there was a need to move to a new privacy/cookie management system that was supposedly better conforming with various legal requirements (apparently RTT was in breach up to now). I am aware that there are issues with it and I'm not best pleased about it but I cannot do anything about it unless you report it to the feedback email address rather than just commenting about it on a forum. You should see the portal once per month unless I change some of the consent requirements. If you see it more often than that, then please report it as it feeds into the trial feedback and whether we tell a company that their trial is over and move onto the next publisher option.
The reality is all I've changed is add that sticky ad at the bottom (which you can close quite easily) and make the bottom ad unit bigger. You don't know what the results of any option are are until you try them, so that's what I had to do. I rejected a lot of options on the table including completely taking over all of the sites edges (like you see on nationalrail.co.uk or a lot of newspaper sites), having ads just randomly appearing within the content, a video box on every page load (and I was offered a LOT of £££ for that). I'm not interested in anything that reduces the user experience substantially but some less bad options have to be investigated.
If you choose not to use the site, that's fine. I live and die by the sword of the users. The reality is that the site was getting close to being unsustainable and the options realistically were be slightly more aggressive in adverts and gain more revenue to invest time in the site, take other work on and let the site be deprived of that time, sell up or close the place down. I chose the former, for now, but I'm not far off looking at the rest.
If you have issues then please report them to the feedback address, as I say, as there's nothing I can do unless it gets reported and centrally logged.
