FFXIAH Objects To RMT But...

First things first. I love the site, it's too valuable these days not to use.

But... I recently came across a post in the Already Pending Suggestion topic which had the authors of this site stating that "we do not condone RMT in any way"

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/?topic_id=136

Then when I look at the ads I see when I bring up the site. The vast majority of them are gilsellers.

How does that work? So they don't condone them but they'll support them?

As I've said before I have no strong opinions about RMT but does this strike anyone else as odd/hypocritical?

Advertisement space for websites is typically sold by your host and given to the highest bidder, if you're not in total control of your website then they can sell it to people who have no morale contract with the player base about letting currency sellers put up something.

It's out of their control, people can choose to ignore it, or gripe about it.

Gotta keep the servers up some how, the part that says, they don't support rmt. Basicly imo is saying, they dont give them money or outa there pocket.

but the RMT's (sites) are giveing them money, to keep the server up, for free, to us, by advertiseing there crap.

I mean, They don't tell you to click on there add's or force you to look at a Add when you log on.

-Add where / spy where all so effects pop' ups seen they check your regresty an junk an make it so your browser picks up Add's that are related to what you like, FF game = FF adds

But long Rant short, w/e makes money

They're Google Ads, Google chooses the Ads depending on site content, not website owners.

It's possible to filter specific website's ads out, but it'd take quite a long time since there's so many of them, and the Ads would probably generate less revenue too.

I imagine a site this this resourceful uses quite a bit of bandwidth too...

as already stated, the adds are based from google, witch pays for the Site(or @least makes it cheaper), so we don't have to pay, most site's give the option of paying "price" to get rid of ads but why should the adims pay for us 2 be add free!! if people had to click on the ads XXX amount of time's the Site advertiment price goes up normaly reducen amount of Ads on the site!! Aswell as Price of getting rid of ads go up by amount of people posting/viewing site,

It also depends on even the text on the webpage.
If you go to that filipino thread, the ads around it have some filipino love site.

I've seen another thread about this before. And if our choices are either gilbuying ads or pay for the site, then I, like virtually everyone else, will go with the ads. They are easily ignored.

Analogously, it'd be like saying you're against drugs, but you will sell your car to a drug dealer, knowing that the money they've obtained came through the sale of drugs. But, with the proceeds from the sale of the car, you can buy a bike for everyone in your neighborhood.

Does the end justify the means?

I know I'm either gonan get flamed ro Spammed.. But don't RMT need to see what was sold too, like all of us???

/laugh!!!!!

I really like the interpretation of this theory.. has many possibilites...

I can't even see them, I have an Ad blocker running which totally removes them from my web browser. Only reason I know about them is because I have lots of adverts on my websites too.

There's many ad blockers for Firefox which will happily remove Google Ads for you should they be causing offense to any users.

I could never block Ads.
I need lols somewhere.
Hey look at the Ads now! "Ads on TV!"

As mentioned, if you look at the Ads the thing to notice is it's "Ads by GOOGLE" not Ads by FFXIAH.com ... Blocking them (I think) harms the ad revenue of this site but just ignore them and DON'T CLICK ON THEM =D

If you can /resist temptation to buy gil it's no big deal lol

I believe Jaerik has replied to this question on more occasions than necessary, I thought everyone would have understood how the ads work by now.

Google ads go by key word searching you search for ffxiah.com, google looks up ffxi, SE don't advertise it that much but RMT websites do. So more often than not you'll get gil sellers ads. I always click a few every time i come here hopefully it helps!

Sci

Yo man, there are already posts about this, honestly it's ignorant of you to assail this website like this on their very own forum. From what i've seen the people who mod this site are very cool and devote much of themselves to this.

This website is free for you, how do you think they make the money to keep it up and running? Advertising, they don't control what sites put their ads up on the page, same as any other website, learn how ***works before you accuse. Unless of course you would rather foot the bill for them.

stop crying use no script

I've replied to this question on numerous occasions, but... I guess I haven't in the past ~4 weeks, so it couldn't hurt to do so again.

FFXIAH.com is very expensive to run. Our bandwidth and database overhead is enormous. When given the option between paying to use the site, or having advertisements and leaving it free to use, our users almost universally said they prefer advertisements. It is also very expensive to support the security infrastructure necessary to handle paid subscriptions over the internet, and not enough people wanted it, so we decided not to go down that route.

Now, there's two ways to put advertisements on a website you own:

1) Hire an entire sales and marketing department to individually go out and try to convince companies to put ads on your site. Then negotiate advertising contracts with them, pay lawyers, create a holding corporation to handle the taxes, etc. Unless you are a large company with a lot of money to throw around, this is impossible. Remember, this site is run by 3 people, 2 of which don't even play FFXI anymore.

2) Contract with an outside advertising agency to place ads for you. You give them the ability to place ads on your site, and they are responsible for finding advertisers for you. This is what we did. The two outside agencies we use are Google AdSense and Tribal Fusion.

Now that you've contracted with an outside agency, you must give them full access to put any ad on your site that they see fit. Typically, they don't want to spend time individually choosing ads to put on your site either -- it takes too much manpower on their part. So the advertising agencies use automated systems to scan the site's text, plus perhaps the IP address that you're viewing the site from, consults its giant pool of advertisements from various companies that match those criteria, and places it on the site when you view it.

In the case of FFXIAH.com, this comes down to the keywords "final fantasy 11, gil, auction house, players, items, accounts," etc. Plus detected user locations primarily consisting of America, Japan, and Europe.

FFXI is a very old game. It is not marketed in stores in any country anymore. The only companies still engaged in "business" that requires advertising relating to these key words are RMT sites. This means that nearly every advertisement that matches the agency's pool of advertisements are going to be from RMT companies. The only other ads that work are things that the agencies have decided apply to wider groups like gamers in general. (Like "how to find a girlfriend." A little offensive when you think about it, but sadly kinda true. =p)

Voila! The result is RMT ads all over FFXIAH.com. (And ironically, the more times "RMT" appears in forum posts, the more it triggers RMT ads being placed on the site!)

Now, most decent ad agencies (like Google AdSense and Tribal Fusion) give the site operators a way to "opt out" of individual ads. We can go into their system and say we don't want to accept one particular ad anymore. We do this frequently when we are alerted to an advertisement that seems to be malicious or otherwise puts our users in danger.

The problem is that there are literally tens of thousands of RMT ads in the system, and you can't opt out until you've seen the ad to know you want to opt out of it. It would require a full-time employee in every conceivable country to sit there and Refresh the site all day, (because they depend on user location), and then individually opt out of that specific ad with the advertising agency. Again, not something we can afford to do.

Companies do not want to pay to place more mainstream, high-quality ads, unless your site caters to a very wide audience and has an extremely high numbers of users. (Because it's more expensive for them to place those ads, so they want to get the most "bang" for their buck.) Our ability to get these ads has steadily increased as our user base has grown. This is why you are gradually seeing more and more high-quality mainstream ads from companies like banks and insurance brokers, other gaming sites, etc. However, they still do not make up a high enough percentage of our revenue to rely on them alone.

I won't specify the exact details of our advertising revenue and operating costs, but I will say that if we did find a way to magically opt out of every RMT ad that our two agencies provide, the site would immediately go out of business.

So, there you have it.

this gets answered so often you guys should consider putting a note in the FAQ about it. FFXIAH does not chose their ads. if you prefer not to see them either download firefox and use the ad block plus add on, or donate HERE!

think about this:

FFXIAH has 56,908 users
if EACH person donates TWO CENTS then we can avoid all ads
(and ffxiah.com will profit 318.16 which they could use to add more features or upgrade)

less complaining more pennies.

there is my two cents! BA DUM CHH!

Added a link to the above post in the FAQ.

Hell >.> every one should donate 1$ >.> i'm sure you lose that much in lose change in the couch per day, or at least in the wash, :D Hell I got like 2$ in pennys just sitting in my car counsel, that ill never use,

the thing is that i would rather send a dollar to a real address rather than through paypal. i have had bad experiences with paypal and the clearing of my account >.< it was years ago, but still.

maybe you could add a po box to send donations to?

So thx to every1 who endeavored to explain the technical details of how ad content is not under the control of Jaerik by any stretch of the imagination.

This is clearly the case of the end justifying the means and tbh I would LOVE to contribute more than my $0.02 worth to get rid of ads but I'm pretty sure others aren't, at least in the numbers FFXIAH needs.

The implementation doesn't answer the question of whether this is odd/hypocritcal though.

Would we be willing to tolerate The Aryan nation buying keywords like Simon Wiesenthal for their ads? How about porn sites bidding on FFXI keywords because they know videogaming guys watch a shitload of porn? (you know who you are...)

As a technical aside the AdSense product does have a way to filter out content, if they can filter out porn then they can filter out advertisers who have 'gil', 'powerleveling' or 'currency' in their ads. (As always on the interweb, porn turns out to be the benchmark...) and yes, I understand the argument that without RMT dollars the website would implode into a singularity.

The flipside of this the becomes: Why do people spend so much time moaning about the evils of RMT? If you're willing to accept their support to keep your favorite service up, how is it different from actually using powerleveling services or gilbuying? Both cases enrich the RMT and the flow of money or services always benefits the player. Isn't that win-win? Why do people only outraged by RMT in-game but not in forums outside of the game?

I think the flipside is by far the more interesting question. I was actually hoping that someone would take a principled stance and say "No to RMTers" but most of the posts are about loss of control and how nothing can be done about it.

Now if this were Sparta...

As an aside Jaerik if there's a way to contribute outside of Paypal, maybe you have a blind trust from the giga-dollars you made as a UO developer (Didja know AC?) with a physical address, then please by all means give me a shout.

Just cause their ads are on the site doesn't mean everyone clicks on them. Just cause people use FFXIAH doesn't mean they're getting powerleveled and buying gil too. You can't lump them together.

Why bother saying no to RMT now, when, I dunno, they've been around since 2004.

They haven't gone anywhere in 4 years, I highly doubt they'll be stopping now. It'd be a losing fight. Nobodies going to go on a holy "RMT IS EVIL" crusade in 2009. It hasn't worked any other time people have done it.

And on a final note, porn =! gilbuying / RMT / powerleveling....

Interesting Note:
The more posts you make with phrases such as "buying gil" and "power levelling service", even to complain about them, the more likely you are to see ads about it on the site. You're just pumping up the keyword count. :P

Just give it a rest guys, I sincerely doubt that anyone in this thread aside from the admins has had any experience dealing with an ad agency. Jaerik has explained the situation in more than enough detail to preclude any arguments as to why they can filter ad X but not ad Y.

I might be hopped up on pain meds, but even I can see the arguments presented in this thread continuing to become less and less coherent. I vote for a thread lock [or derail] before this inevitably degenerates into insinuations that someone is a nazi and/or terrorist.

Or [god forbid]... COMMIE NAZIS!

Seeing as this thread has now been enshrined for posterity with a permanent link in the FAQ, I'm cleaning up the off-topic debates to make the information easier to find, then locking the thread.

If you wish to continue the debate, apologies for cleaning up your post. Please do so in another thread. Thanks. =)