Just Curious

We all are against RMT activities, or claim to be anyway. Just wondering why the only ads showing on this site are RMT related. Doesnt make alot of sense, does it?

Sitting on my screen at the moment is a Washington Mutual ad, one advertisement for a dating site, another is a political poll. When I refresh the page, I get one for Kaiser Permanente and another for Gamevance.com. When I refresh again, I get one for DiTech mortgages and another for Nubella healthy cooking recipes. I'd be happy to take a screenshot if you don't believe me. It's certainly not the case that the "only ads" are RMT.

As more and more mainstream advertisers express interest at advertising here, we are taking them all up on the offer and slowly replacing the RMT ads wherever we can. However, sheer economic logistics dictates that we either keep some RMT ads for now, or we take the site offline entirely due to being unable to meet our operating overhead. Take your pick.

This question is also answered, along with an explanation of the decision and its history, in the site FAQ.

hmm, maybe its just here its only rmt ads then, "Buy/sell FFXI account/gil" "FF11 Gil autumn hot sales" "Cheap FFXI Gil" "Sell your FFXI account" "Buying Level 75 FFXI accounts, paying $75 to $5,000" these are the only ones I see, no mateer how many times a refresh the page.

Another reason could be how companies track your visiting habits. For instance, I go on FFxi and AH.com more then i look at anything else. My ISP is tracked on what my "interest" are and shows me advertisements that relate to that. Since SE doesnt advertise FF11 alot and no other companies have any interest in advertising this game, that just leaves the RMT sites. Now 9/10 i have gil buying ads on my pages here and on wiki. Ironically theres a Circuit City ad up as I type this. LOL The second ad is a gil buy, from IGXE.com tho. Maybe im wrong about how that works, but i see that pattern on lots of sites.

The way it works is by keyword of the site content. Most sites do not negotiate advertising on their own -- it's too time consuming and the legalities are too difficult. Instead, you sign up for an advertising agency such as Tribal Fusion or others. Google AdSense is another recent example of this agency model.

The agency then scans your site to determine its content by keyword, and it attempts to match it with the keywords of advertisements it's currently running. The primary key words of this site are Final Fantasy Online-related of course, and as SE doesn't advertise FF:O online anymore, that means the only advertisements currently in circulation at any major ad agency that match keyword are typically RMT ads. (Especially the ones from Google.)

These ads get cycled into the rotation randomly as people come to the page. We have little to no control over them. While we can specify that very certain ads should be blocked, sitting here all day and squashing one RMT ad after another would be pretty much a full time job, and have the unfortunate side effect of driving the site out of business at the same time.

Instead, we have done our best recently to try and reach out to advertising agencies that are willing to advertise under different models. Hence why you're gradually seeing more ads like... well, on my page right now, it's an AT&T ad, a Classmates.com ad, some search service, and a medical insurance ad. There's also a Fujifilm and a Nokie ad when I refresh. There's also a Cox Communications ad, which is interesting because it appears to have determined my location from my IP to know that I already have Cox cable internet, which is kinda cool. I refresh again and get a Swat Assault game ad and something about a free turn based MMO, then some from eBay and Capital One.

These kinds of ads also tend to pay a lot more (notice that they're of much higher quality production than the cheapo text RMT ads), so we're doing our best to swap them out as much as we can. (And, incidentally, the more traffic we get from you guys, the more clout we have to pick and choose from advertisers.) There's no reason for us to want RMT ads on the site because typically they don't pay very well anyway. There's just so many of them at any given ad agency that it's hard to get them 100% off the site. We're working towards that, though.

if you don't want to see RMT ads do one of two things:

1. donate money to ffxiah. running the site isn't cheap, and they don't get to pick their ads.
2. get firefox and download the add-on called ad block plus and subscribe to one of the lists that block all sorts of ads (it's free).

seems like this question gets asked a lot. check out the FAQ page...theres actually a lot of stuff in there that is pretty interesting.

Speak of RMT's. anyone else that have gotten POL messages from RMT sites? I have gotten atleast 4 msg through POL from RMT sites that are advertising gil selling, so have lots of ppl from my ls. Everytime I get them I add the sender to ignore list and send a mail to special task force with the name of the char sending it, and the adress of the site they are advertising for. Still really annoying how they now active are reaching out to you in game. Before I got those messages I thought that only ppl from your friendlist were able to send message to you, obviously I was wrong :(

yea i received a few messages from a rmt site....they need to make their moneys...but they are not gonna get any of mine..

Doesn't that sorta defeat the purpose of having ads in the first place?

We would naturally prefer that people not block the ads, as it simply hurts the site's ability to keep operating. But we understand if people feel they have to.

Haha, aw... in that case I can handle a few ads. Once I get a solid job I'm so contributing to FFXIAH.com, you guys do a lot, and it's the least I can do out of appreciation (^^)v

Wait, do you mean if I've donated then I won't see adds?

Or did you mean just donate to compensate for not viewing or clicking the adds?

just use firefox with noscript you dont eaven see the ad