Thoughts on advertising

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My main priority for Project Spurs is to provide quality content for Spurs fans, whether that be through articles, blog posts, podcasts, game photos and video or even the live video and audio shows we started doing last season and plan on doing more of this season.
Making money has never been of much importance for me so I’ve kept this blog ad-free up until today. You’ll notice there are two new ad spots, one under the banner and before the posts and a “sponsors” area in the sidebar for another graphical ad and text links.


Ads help us pay for a few costs that come with running Project Spurs and the Spurscast, including our monthly hosting bill and the hardware/software we use for recording the shows. Up until now, I kept a few text link ads on the main projectspurs.com page, but I’ll be changing things over soon so there will no longer be two separate areas for written content. We used to keep more of the newsy stuff on the main page and gameday blogs, rants etc.. on this blog page. I decided to keep al the written content on one page so none of it gets overlooked or buried and we don’t confuse our readers.
In the next couple of weeks, the blog will undergo a facelift to take the look of the Project Spurs home page with a few slight changes. So with the blog becoming the home page (although we will redirect the https://projectspurs.com/blog domain to the main index page) I decided to create an area in the sidebar for the current ads running on projectspurs.com and create a new area near the top of the page for a banner ad.
I did want to get your thoughts on this though. I don’t want the advertising spots to take away from the content you come here for and I don’t want it to be a distraction either. I know from my own personal online reading that there are a lot of sites out there that are inundated with ads and popups that either take away from the content of the page because they overpopulate the actual content or there are the popups that I have to close just to get to what I want to read.
Unless you are cool and with it and read us through our rss feed you’ll surely notice the ads and I want to make sure they aren’t a nuisance or bother the people that take time out of their busy schedules to read what a few diehard Spurs fans have to say.
We aren’t striking it rich off of these ads, but it’s enough to pay the hosting bill and hopefully start giving some of our contributors some “beer money” for their awesome efforts. So if we have to scale back on the ad spots because of overwhelming feedback in opposition to the advertising , I won’t hesitate to do it.
So let me know what you think in the comments or you can email me at michael@projectspurs.com.

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Michael is the founder and editor of ProjectSpurs.com. He has a long history in journalism, sports and online media. Michael has been interviewed by the BBC, SportTalk, the Sports Reporters Radio Show, MemphisSportLive, OKC Sports Wrap and ESPN radio among others.