Technical Support Forum

There's plenty of threads here in the support forum from the months we spent attempting to block the ad-blockers. It was a time consuming and generally annoying effort that led to, believe it or not, more complaint threads in here than our resource limitations did.

With your suggestion of a site like Pornhub, it should be noted that most such ads don't pay just for showing ads, but instead pay based on individuals signing up for accounts or paying on those site... which we found through various past attempts, don't actually pay anything. The act of showing an ad, even getting past an ad blocker, does not mean there's revenue from it. In the case of interactive stories, even without ad-blockers, most people mentally block out the ads as they are just clicking from chapter, to chapter, to chapter... regardless of ad placement (of which we've tried many, many different placements over the years).

And so... Professional adblocker-blockers offered by other companies actually cost more money than we'd earn from any ads "seen" -- given that our content does not lend itself to ads that pay per view, but instead ads that pay per action by the users. Free account holders here are simply not likely to pay for accounts or buy services elsewhere. Historical attempts at this have shown us this to be true and affiliate ads simply didn't produce results.

Instead, we've actually removed the vast majority of ads from our interactive pages. They used to be loaded with annoying, intrusive and as it turned out, rather fruitless ads. There's now just a couple Amazon ads (that pay very little, again, because people have to actually buy something for us to earn money) and ads for our own paid memberships. We do think the experience for our free users now far surpasses the experience before, when the resource load is low. In the past, we tried to load the pages up with enough ads to make a penny here and there and it led to a cluttered and ugly page.

We also recently, before implementing more strict limitations, tried crypto-coin mining, which may have been slightly promising, except that free account holders complained far more about that when it was "forced" onto them than they have for the limitations we have in place now... We removed that and now we offer it to everyone as an option for people to mine Gift Points to earn a paid memberships, rather than paying money for it.

An "offer wall" where members can complete action, like watching a video ad or completing a survey, may end up an additional option, like mining, for all members to earn additional Gift Points. We're currently researching that and may implement it if a good option is available and worthwhile. We will also continue to look for ways and options to offer people the ability to earn paid memberships, rather than paying for them outright.

Yes, our policy is absolutely "more drastic" now than it had been for limitations in the past because it's simply just come to that.


The point of this particular response of mine being that in our 18 years, we've tried many, many (many) ways to monetize the interactive stories. They are a small subset of the actual writing here on Writing.Com but the highest (by far) use of resources. We're happy to continue providing them, unlimited in use to our paid members (6 cents per day for a 1 year basic) and with limitations to free members and visitors to the site. This is not to offend anyone, but instead to be realistic with the economies of running such a project for the long term. As many other free venues have come and gone, we remain strong and stable, and with our proper planning, will do so for a long time to come.

Best,
~~SM


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