We're in a really difficult situation right now. Our longstanding ad suppliers dropped us suddenly, leaving us with very few options ( as we're not accepted by Google or any of the other big suppliers because many people post links to nsfw material).

Our costs are high as we have a full time member of staff who handles the 100+ emails per day, 300+ URL claims per day and 500+ pages that need manual review per day, and we are actively developing the service. That mixed with other business costs and hosting runs up a bill of about $5k per month, which is about $150 per day.

We have two options at the moment with ad suppliers: The current problematic one and another, less tested but to my knowledge not problematic. The current one is bringing in about what we need to survive and has essentially been lying to us repeatedly - from the start we told them we want a simple non nsfw banner (which is how it works on desktop, or at least I've never had the popup behaviour), but they seem incapable of preventing popups on mobile. I've never seen any 18+ ads come up myself with them and any that were reported to us we've forwarded on as a complaint.

In my tests of this other supplier, they bring it about 10x less than the current one, which is solidly below our expenses. We're serving about 400k pageviews per day, but without the support of the big ad companies, it's proving near impossible to monitize adequately.

As for solutions I have three plans:

#1 - Switch away from ads as the primary source of income. This is taking shape as an optional subscription system that will disable ads for yourself, and also for the viewers of your pages. I'm aiming for this to be feature complete this week and to start to roll it out as soon as possible after that. It's shaped up to be quite a large update as quite a lot of overhaul and new functionality was needed, including a full account system.

#2 - Split the traffic into people sharing nsfw and everyone else. The nsfw sharers can be shown higher earning ad types as they typically don't care about this, and everyone else can see banners that absolutely do not include any popups. I'm making good progress on this too, today I believe my changes increased income by $30 per day, which gets us a good bit closer to the $150 target. To clarify my work on this today improved the automatic detection of the nsfw sharing group's pages.

#3 - Ditch the current supplier as soon as possible. They are not vetting their ads well enough or disabling popups after we have repeatedly asked them to.

Overall this has been an absolute nightmare but I hope once these two solutions are fully in place, the platform will come out stronger than before, as even the longstanding ad supplier over the last few years was drawing a number of complaints over intrusive (though at least not inappropriate) ads.

And for the record I am absolutely done with ads as a primary source of revenue, they do nothing but bring a project down. I can't turn them off as that will lead to immediate collapse, but the direction is set. All of my future projects will be primarily monitised in other ways instead.

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Pub: 20 Aug 2025 20:33 UTC

Edit: 20 Aug 2025 20:47 UTC

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