3 Month Trial for Ads on HDRI Haven

Two weeks ago I asked our patrons whether or not we should display a few unobtrusive ads on HDRI Haven to obtain some additional income alongside their donations. The results of the poll are as follows: 

If this is the first you’re hearing about potential ads on HDRI Haven, please read that post to understand the context and reasoning behind both options. This is not a decision I take lightly.

In the post I said “The results of this poll will decide whether or not we display a small number of unobtrusive ads on HDRI Haven… [after two weeks] I'll announce the results and respect your choice either way.”

It seems the overwhelming majority is OK with ads on HDRI Haven under the conditions I described there (few, small, unobtrusive, with the ability for patrons to disable them, and with no attempt to dissuade the use of ad-blockers) - but even still, I’m on the fence about it.

HDRI Haven is something I’ve poured my heart into - every inch of the site is a custom design made to be intuitive and give you what you’re looking for as quickly as possible. Placing ads on the site (even in relatively out of the way places) feels to me like slapping cheap stickers on an oil painting you’ve been working on for the last 3 years.

The potential for 50% additional income is considerable and should be useful in growing our craft and ultimately helping more artists, yet I can’t help but feel like I’m ignoring my heart telling me to “be the change you want to see in the world”.

So here’s what we’re gonna do:

We’re gonna try ads out for 3 months and see how things work.

During this time I want to hear from you what your experience is, both your overall impressions and your nitpicks. I want to know if you think the ads are distracting, in a bad place, making the site feel cheap, getting in the way of downloads, or misleading you in any way.

During the 3 months, I’m going to discuss with Sergej and Andreas (our regular HDRI authors) about how the additional income is beneficial, and if there’s no noticeable long-term benefit to you guys then we’ll cut the ads.

I’m also personally going to disable all ad-blockers on my devices, so that I’m not subjecting you to something that I myself am not willing to put up with.

Since I had no feedback about how the additional income should be allocated, I’ll go with my original idea: Half of it will be added directly to the patreon donations, the majority of which goes to HDRI authors which should help us produce more valuable HDRIs. The other half will be set aside for savings and hiring additional help that should benefit the site as a whole in the long term (e.g. hiring an assistant). You can read the original poll post for more details, and of course follow our usual public finance reports to ensure we’re not just being greedy.

One thing I failed to address in the original post was ad trackers. Ads typically come with code that tracks your behavior across the internet (on all sites where the same ad-network or partner network is being used) and forms a statistical profile of your preferences in order to try and show you ads that you’re more likely to click on. This can be seen as an unconsented invasion of privacy that many users (myself included) are uncomfortable with.

There are certainly options for advertising without trackers, like manually running our own ad server and trying to contact companies willing to advertise on our site, but we just don’t have the time or resources to do this.

This week I’ll work on implementing Google AdSense on HDRI Haven, though there’s a review process so I have no idea when it’ll actually go live. The first stage will be an iterative experiment in finding appropriate places to put the ads, which I need your feedback for. Then once I’ve made some progress there, I’ll work on a simple system to allow patrons to disable ads.

I’ll also do some more research into options of tracker-free and more context-aware ad systems (let me know if you can point me in the right direction), other than that if you have any ideas or feedback please leave a comment below.