[Matrix]

Originally posted by Harry

I'd be not too sure about the "long time", but thanks for answering Matrix's question. Matrix: is not our fault, unfortunately.

I'll try to explain a complex thing in two words, if you are interested.

Three-four years ago we would have made several thousands of dollars with our current impressions (number of pages read by our visitors) and daily unique visitors. Advertisers used to paid "impressions" - for example, they were willing to pay 10$ (and much more) every 1,000 views of their banners. Let's say we currently have 40,000 daily pageviews on psfantasy.com - we would have been able to make 400$ dollars, daily.

Little by little, bigger companies and advertising networks started to offer lower rates for advertising on the Internet - after all, unlike smaller and medium websites, they were selling packages of millions of monthly impressions. The next step was offering pay-per-click and then pay-per-performance campaigns, that nowadays represent the standard: basically the advertiser pays only if a user buy something through a website. For example, you click on Ebay's banner, you register at Ebay, and then you buy something - at that point, we should receive let's say $4.00, but no earlier than one month after your purchase.

But this isn't the true meaning of advertising: on magazines, TV and radio stations, the true power of advertising is that you can let others know about your brand, your products, your name. Ad networks let advertisers create their rules on the Internet, and now we are part of a mechanism we - the small/medium websites - haven't created, but we've stupidly supported. They have turned us into their 24/24 365/365 risk-free online shops, and unluckily just a bunch of readers buys something by clicking on the banners in content-based websites - I mean, if you want to buy a game online, you just type the URL of your favorite online shop and you buy it.

So, there are less funds than many years ago, but owners of websites must provide good content to attract visitors, and they must pay increasingly higher rates to mantain their servers, pay bandwidth*, and all the rest.

*bandwidth - Bandwidth is the amount of data a website transfers over the Net. Basically, every single picture you see in this page consumes bandwidth, every single screenshot consumes bandwidth, every single page you see consumes bandwidth that we must pay.

thanks for explaining some stuff, I do know what bandwidth is of course( some people doen't though!!!!!!)