Poll Results: Advertising

I ran a little experiment on the side of my website for a few weeks. Someone suggested I take away some space from traditional advertising and use it for affiliate programs instead.

So I did a little digging and decided to go with Amazon.com. I found a few Minecraft items I thought would be interesting to players and put links to them in the newly-carved-out space on the side of my site.

So I replaced this:

With this:

I also put a poll underneath the Amazon links to ask players what they thought. Here are the results of the poll, with 159 players responding:

The response has been overwhelmingly positive so far. The vast majority of players said they preferred the Minecraft loot in comparison to only a few players who preferred the traditional advertising.

Almost a third of respondends block ads entirely though. If these results are at all representative of the general population, then it's really bad news for the economic sustainability of the internet as a whole. Free content on the internet isn't really free, and advertising does a large part to pay content creators for their work. If advertising becomes less effective over time, then fewer content creators will be able to offer their work for free. If this trend continues, the internet will have less and less free content in it and will be generally a much less fun place to hang out. Let's hope this trend reverses or gets replaced with a better economic process entirely.

Astonishingly, 6% of the respondents reported that Minecraft modders should not earn money at all for their work, even through indirect means such as advertising. =(

Players have definitely been taking an interest in the amazon links though, so I redesigned the Minecraft loot section of the website to have a much simpler more streamlined look and added a much larger variety of Minecraft items. The selection on any given page is random, so the next time you visit, there might something new you haven't seen before.

Clicking on the link does nothing except take you to the product page on amazon where you can see more information, bigger pictures, etc. So there's no harm in just browsing. =)

If you do decide to buy something (not just one of these items, but anything on amazon.com), I'll get a small commission for the sale. In addition to donations, doing your Amazon.com shopping by starting with one of these links is a great way to support Minecraft modding.