Requesting Feedback and advertising suggestions

[Elleffgee]

Hello:

I started my site at www.eq2flames.com in late September 2006. This is my first website ever, and I just last week had the design and skin redone by Miner Skinz to include advertising panels. We previously did not have advertising, but my site became too expensive to continue paying for out of my own pocket as a hobby, so I finally decided to monetize the site and am looking for a viable advertising solution.

The site is presently getting between 1.2 and 1.8 million page views per month, and 6000+ unique visitors per day, with over 32,000 unique visitors by month (based on unique non-spider IP numbers).

One problem is that Alexa appears to be severely under-reporting my score, and despite the numerous legit pages on other sites that link mine, continues to report that only six other sites on the Internet link mine.

I've installed vBSeO, read everything, followed all the directions, but that didn't improve my Alexa score or result in any readily apparent benefits at all.

I'm striking out completely with the larger, legit advertisers. I've been rejected by Burst, advertising.com, etc., etc. I am deeply dissatisfied with the Adbrite solution we have now, they seem to be only able to provide completely irrelevant banner and text ads, mostly related to financial services, which have nothing whatsover to do with my site, which involves online video games and gamers.

I cannot use Google Adsense based on the nature of my site. Google Adsense would mostly deliver ads that are highly offensive to my users and go against the core values of my site. What I mean is that Google Adsense would mostly attract illicit advertisers to my site seeking to advertise sales of in-game virtual currency and "hack and cheat" information. One of the core values of my site is opposition to these advertisers, who violate game developer's terms of service and EULAs by selling in game currency for real world money. Hardcore gamers, who are the bulk of my users, find this practice highly offensive and consider it to ruin their ingame experience, so I can't advertise for such sites, nor do I want to as a matter of principle.

I realize that Google Adsense can be set to filter out sites I don't want to display, but that doesn't solve the problem. The most complete Google Adsense filters I've seen in use cannot stop these ads from appearing. Since Google doesn't allow a site to preselect ads, you can only filter them out once they appear. The problem is that an illicit advertiser can create new domains that will slip through faster than I can ban them from my site through Adsense, and even then it takes a few hours before those ads stop being served by Adsense.

So I'm looking for an advertising solution that doesn't involve Adsense or Adbrite. For the major advertisers, I keep getting rejected on the grounds that they don't allow sites that are mostly forums. So I figured I'd post here, since vBulletin is all about forums, and certainly some of y'all have found a solution that can provide a good selection of quality advertisers without having to resort to ads that aren't in the best interest of my site.

The site description I've been submitting to advertisers is as follows:

EQ2Flames is a leading fansite for the online game EverQuest II by Sony Online Entertainment.

Our site has become very popular with this game community, and usually has 1000 users and guests on line at any given time. Our traffic currently peaks up to 1500 to 1800 users and guests during US business hours.

The site is gently moderated, with content provided by the leading players of the game. It is considered the site where the "cool people" hang out. We use a "free speech" format, which attracts many users from the official SoE forums. We have a strong SoE developer presence on our site, and these devs often interact with players and answer user questions.

Racial and religious slurs, porn, and illegal content are highly prohibited on our site and quickly deleted.

Our user demographic is 80 percent males between the ages of 18 and 40, with the balance females. Our average user spends over 4 hours per day, 7 days per week, playing on line video games. All of our users own gaming computer systems.

We do not permit ads from the secondary MMO market, i.e., gold sellers, and sites that sell "hacks, cheats and exploits" and other infringing and illegal activity.

Our site is ideal for advertisers seeking to reach people whose primary hobby and entertainment involves on line video games.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions anyone may have to improve my site in general, but more importantly, to help me find an advertising solution that will work for me based on the above information and criteria.

Thank you

[ChaosProgrammer]

Why don't you go for adsense? Seriously, why should they get offended? You won't get ONLY gold selling, you will most likely get keyloggers/private servers/ that kind of stuff. Seriously bro, it's from far the best. And if you sign, sign from my website so I get referral. No, I am kidding on that one =)

[Elleffgee]

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to advertise for anyone here, because I'm not. I just wanted to follow this up with what I've learned, in case anyone else with what I assume is a "medium sized" forum site like mine finds themselves in a similar situation.

Unfortunately, many Internet advertising companies do not accept "Forum Sites" as publishers. Those advertisers, such as valueclick.com, apparently don't consider "forum sites" to provide valuable or legitimate content for advertising purposes, in the way they do sites that put up static web pages as primary content.

The Internet advertising agencies I've found to be "Forum Site Friendly" and have been accepted by are:

adtegrity.com
adxdirect.com
mammamediasolutions.com

Each of those advertisers are nice, accept forum sites if they meet traffic and content criteria, and will assign you to someone to work with once you're accepted.

Thank you

P.S.: I've not yet moved all my panels over to one of the above sites yet, but plan to do so tonight after work. I'm just saying that in case anyone looks at my site now, sees the Adbrite stuff I have up, and thinks that is what I've gone with. Nope, that's what I'm getting away from.

Thanks again