A "few" words on Ads

What a boring topic for a news post, right?
Well, if you don’t care about the ads here, skip this one, there’s nothing pet related in this news post!
But if you are curious about the ads on Xu-Fu’s, or maybe even bothered by them, then I encourage you to read on. There's indeed some news at the end of this post ;-)

1. The big question upfront, why ads!?

Simply put, to pay for the server and the occasional giveaway. Over the years, visitor numbers here have steadily grown to a point where a cheap server simply didn’t cut it anymore. After a couple of server moves, the current one is beefy and so far runs very smoothly, but it comes at a price of course. The ads are paying for it though, with some extra which goes into giveaways and, quite honestly, myself - thank you for the occasional bonus!

With ads, I've always been trying to strike a balance between not having to pay for running the page (after it became a noticeable amount), but also not annoying visitors with an overload of ads. My intention has never been to monetize the **** out of this community but lately that balance was very much off, with way too many ads that impacted the user experience and made Xu-Fu a bit meh. Why? Because of a change of heart about monetization? No, pretty far from it. But to explain, I'll have to go into a bit of a history.

2. My history with ads

Feel free to skip this entire section if you just want the interesting news. I just rarely have a chance to talk about my experiences with ads and ad providers and this place is as good as any :D
It's a whole different world of the internet that I only experienced thanks to Xu-Fu's. And it's a weird world, I can tell you that. So here is a ton of oversharing - hopefully some of it interesting! Also, the companies I call by name here, I've collaborated with, and even if I say some critical things about them, the experience was mostly very positive.

2.1 Google AdSense

Xu-Fu is a hobby for me. It's fun, I enjoy coding new features, creating the tools that you all are using to make your pet battles easier. I love that part of the "work". I do not enjoy researching advertisement providers or writing ad placement code or doing SEO optimisation. Big yuck. And because of that, for years there were no ads on the page at all. I did add some very simple ones via Google AdSense at some piont, which is most peoples first (and often only) choice when starting out. It's easy enough to create some ad units and put the code on your page but the money share you get is abysmal. Low effort, low return. Fair enough!

But the more Xu-Fu grew, the more attention it got from dedicated ad management companies. They use tools to monitor internet traffic, like Amazons Alexa Rank (which doesn't exist anymore) or Semrush. With that, they find pages with growing traffic, check their ad setups, look up an email address, and spam them. And by spam, I mean spam. Most of these are cold sales emails and I get about 3-5 of those per week. Still. Since around 2018.
Here's two very typical examples if you're curious how those look like:

Example 1

Example 2

Some are much more lengthy but what they have in common is, they are very impersonal and full-on business-talk. Clearly aimed at webpages that exist solely for the purpose of monetizing them, which... the majority of webpages nowadays are. Well, Xu-Fu is not, so I've been ignoring these emails, until I've got contacted by a company called Venatus.

2.2 Venatus

Their sales person at the time was a gamer, played WoW, knew about pet battles, actually had a look at Xu-Fu's and understood what the page was about. And what made me actually read his email was, he addressed me with "Aranesh"! That was a first!
They clearly did their research and showed a genuine interest. It was the first time I answered to one of those emails and after some back and forth, we started working together.

It was a very slow process. Everything was new to me, but long story short we moved ads from Google AdSense over to Venatus some time 2019. Honestly, nothing to complain until a few years later. Then around 2022, the ads started to not bring much return anymore. Page visits increased, ad performance decreased. The people I previously interacted with had changed as well and maybe they've grown so much that Xu-Fu wasn't an interesting enough client anymore, being quite small in comparison.
I don't know what happened honestly but in the meanwhile, two other companies had established contact with me already, also having done their research really well and even chatting to me on Discord. They were similarly casual and understanding of fanpages vs. business webpages. I just had a long binding contract with Venatus and had to wait until that expired. When that happened, it was a pretty smooth transition. Going chronologically, next up in 2023 was:

2.3 Playwire

As the name suggests, they focus a lot on gaming and more "modern" online tech. They are one of the largest ad platforms in the UK and have some big names under them, like Scopely or Crunchyroll. I signed with them after Venatus and had been with them for almost a year. Funny anecdote, a few months ago I was doing a city-trip here in the UK with my partner and while sitting in an almost empty café for breakfast, we overheard a sales pitch next to us. Someone was praising their advertisement platform to a group of people, laptop with a powerpoint and all. He hammered the point how easy the system is and how little work is needed from the webpage coders. Yup, it was a Playwire rep :D

The "low effort" implementation is very true, I had the same experience. It took maybe 30 minutes to set everything up in terms of coding. But the same thing was also the reason why I moved away from them again.
All other ad platforms that I worked with have a similar tech where you log into their backend and create an "ad placement". A snippet of code that defines the type of ad, the size and shapes but also things like refresh rates, video, display, sound and so on. Then you take that snippet and put it within your webpage where you want it to be shown. You "place" it.

Playwire works differently. All you need is to add one tiny script to initiate it and they do the rest. They inject the ads where it makes sense, between articles, or comments, on the sides and so on. That gives them almost full control. Of course, we had a back and forth during the implementation and I pushed back against simply maximizing ad space. Popups, sound, and any kind of anti-adblocker tech were always a no-go for me and they did adhere to that but over time the ad load grew quite a bit, too much for my liking. There even were a few bugs where you could end up having a page with *just ads*, 40-50 of them in one long stack below each other. And all I could do was raise the issue and wait for them to fix it.
I also couldn't create different ad setups based on user settings (like I had before), another sore point.

All that being said, they were super nice about everything and their system is really good for page owners who want to make the most money out of their domain with little effort.
But that's not Xu-Fu, so with a bit of a heavy heart, earlier this year, I moved to:

2.4 NitroPay

Nitro are focused even more on the gaming space, exclusively to my knowledge. They are owned by Overwolf which also owns CurseForge, likely familiar to most readers. Their implementation is much more traditional and after switching over, I now have full control over all ad placements again, yay! And that's also the reason for this lengthy news post and the little announcements below. In terms of ad tech, it really was a journey with many learnings and hopefully some of it interesting to you!

3. So what's new? (or, how can I get rid of ads?)

Thanks for indulging me in talking a bit about tech and the stuff that happens in the background. Now on to what's changed for you, and what you can do about ads (outside of using an adblocker which is totally fine with me!):

3.1 Option to reduce ads

Go to your Settings and scroll to the section Advertisement. There, you can reduce the amount of ads shown to you. It won't remove all of them, but a good chunk of them, about half. No questions asked! This existed in the past and I had to remove it due to Playwire's setup but now it's back. If you're bothered by ads, this is for you. And if you aren't and are fine keeping them on, thanks!

3.2 Ko-Fi Connection

In addition, Xu-Fu is now connected to Ko-Fi and if you make any donation of any size, you'll get the option to remove ads entirely forever. Just make sure that the email address you use for the donation is also registered to your account here and it'll work :-)
And, it's retroactive! So if you made a donation in the past, same thing applies. You can still decide to opt into ads if you wish so but again, that's entirely up to you. Since it's brand new, if there's any issues with this implementation please send me an email to [email protected], thanks!

That's it! That's the news. I hope you enjoyed the tech blabber :D
Wishing you all a wonderful day and week!
Aranesh