Re: [gentoo-trustees] Advertisement requests

[Lance Albertson]

On Sun, 2005-05-22 at 09:12 -0700, Corey Shields wrote:
> On Sunday 22 May 2005 04:52 am, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> <snip>
> > My personal opinion has always been to decrease the advertisements on the
> > Gentoo website itself and make the Sponsors [1] page more accurate with the
> > current sponsoring (the page is currently a bit outdated).
>
> I agree..  I've said for quite a while now that we should a) take away the
> text under the ads, since for the most part it just reiterates what the ads
> say, and b) figure out a way to randomly rotate their order...   While I
> don't mind the ads, I think fewer is better than more..

Right now I'd like to at least keep the ads for folks providing us
hosting and bandwidth as these ads have definately helped them pay for
our costs and potentially adding more hardware/bandwidth to use. One
example is that Sevenl.net should be hopefully moving to a 100Mbit
connection, and much of it is thanks to our ad giving them more
exposure. They (and the other sponsors) have been very kind in trying to
provide the best service possible. I'd very much to at least keep the
image ads up for those folks. I'd like to also suggest that any ad we
place needs to be a non-animated type. Its very annoying trying to read
a howto doc with something flashing at you.

Swift: we can do a random order thing easily can we? If not, lets just
try and change the order every 2-3 months to keep things fair for all
sponsors.

> > To facilitate the maintenance of the Sponsors page I have started
> > documenting the current sponsoring (who sponsors what). Based on this
> > (hopefully to become) complete information I would draft a guideline what
> > we see as a Sponsor.
>
> Sweet!  When you get around to the OSL part, can you change the logo to:
>
> http://osuosl.org/about/copy_of_logos/osl_logo/variant/medium
>
> > Others would be then called "Contributors". Currently contributors are not
> > shown on the Gentoo website since many contributions happen through PayPal
> > donations. Would it be feasible to have all PayPal contributions (and
> > others) listed automatically somewhere (like in KDE's donations page [2])?
>
> I like the idea, but it could get tricky.. First of all I wouldn't want to
> post anyone's name without their prior permission, some people might not want
> to be listed to avoid other people/projects taking the list and begging them
> for donations.  (the guy who donated $1,000 needs a freakin GWN article)  :)
>
> > If so, we might want to put up such a "Contributions" page on which not
> > only PayPal contributions but also other, non-Sponsoring contributions are
> > listed.
> >
> > In short, my questions are:
> > - Do we find it feasible to have a contributions page?
>
> well, I guess I am still a bit confused as to where the line is drawn between
> sponsor and contributor.

Me too, how do we define it? To me a sponsor provides us with a
continuing influx of either hardware/bandwidth/funding. Examples of
which are vr.org, sevenl.net, AMD, etc.

> > - Should be decrease (or even nullify) the advertisements on the Gentoo
> >   website (and therefore denying all advertisement requests)?
>
> I don't know what our unofficial agreements are with these groups, but I think
> some of them are giving us hosting in return for the adspace.  Lance has been
> working with some of them lately, I'll let him answer that.

As stated above, I'd like the only advertisments that are on the site to
be ones that help our hardware/bandwidth providers pay for our end of
the costs. Its a small price for us to pay just to include the ad and
its well worth it. All these groups have great people behind them and
I'd hate to piss any of them off just to clean our site from ads. 

Since the store will be going away soon, I'd like to suggest we take the
ad for the store off after tomorrow and take the other links on the site
until we get the other store corey is working on online totally. (Of
course, if corey feels its ok to start, thats his call).

Daniel: this was the thing you were ok with, right? (You wanted
store.g.o to still work for customer service issues for a month, but
didn't mind us taking the links off). Just wanted to confirm this from
you.

While we're talking about ads, I was just in the process of updating the
ads on the site with new images from the sponsors. I'll post a bug #
once I get that going so we can track any changes. 

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@g.o>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

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