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*Warning -- another long Foman post. See Summary at the end if you're too lazy to read all of my reasoning. But I suggest you take 2 minutes and read the whole thing*
Ugh. I'm torn.
This website has been my favorite for a long time. Not-so-coincidentally, it is also the only free website that I visit that has no advertisements. That gives this place much more of a "just us (Bungie) and you (Community)" feel that was free even from the profit-obsessed Microsoft juggernaut (see, for example, the hideous MSN.com, which proves that there's no such thing as "tasteful" advertising). Putting advertisements here would destroy that feeling, instead giving me the impression that I was always being watched and tracked, regardless of whether it was true or not. Furthermore, I love Bungie and I'd feel pressure to "help" you guys out by clicking on the ads from time to time.
On the other hand, I've always been in favor of anything that gets more profits to Bungie. More profits mean better games and better service, which works out better for me. In a way, it's kind of selfish of me to want you to get more money, but I think that it's a symbiotic desire.
Apropos:
This website is great because it has a great community -- not because the site itself is flawless. If the website were run "for-profit," I would expect (not "hope" but rather "expect") big improvements to the site. Perhaps we could finally get some of the features that we ask for, considering that a large chunk of Bungie revenue would now depend on us actually visiting the site.
The broken search feature, the lack of features and visibility for private groups, the horrifyingly spammy forums and lack of moderators for them, the woefully inadequate help pages (that turn this very forum into a tech support forum staffed -- for free -- by benevolent Community members), and the general feeling of being ignored by everybody at Bungie except Achronos and ferrex. These are all things that I would expect to be fixed now that Bungie was getting revenue thanks to me (and everyone else) spending our time here.
I don't mean to sound harsh -- I love you guys and I think the web team does a great job. But if you ask me, and I think that a lot of people would agree, the general feeling around here is that the Community-oriented aspect of the Bnet website is a low priority for Bungie. Thus, the web team gets pulled off of Community-oriented projects in favor of for-the-masses projects (for example, not updating the group features in favor of dealing with the Halo 3 Stats databases). That's understandable at the moment, considering that the website is a calculated cost rather than a revenue-generating asset to Bungie right now. Therefore, right now, the priority is to keep general interest in the website high for the basically disinterested public. In other words, provide a place for the average guy who plays some Halo and wants to check his stats once a week or wants to put up a screenshot every now and then to show his buddies.
Start in with the advertisements, and those priorities shift. Now, your revenue generating base for the website is the various Community members who visit this site daily. You know -- the ones who log into BNet as soon as they wake up to see what happened while they were asleep. The ones who visit BNet every single time that they get downtime at work. The ones who post 500 or more posts per month. The ones who delve into the site beyond the front page, the news, and the Halo 3 Forum. They are the ones who will see all of the various dozens of advertisements on a daily basis, and thus they are the ones who Bungie will need to please in order to keep coming back to the site.
At that point, it will be a severe hit to this place to lose guys like dalmedya, who recently stopped his daily visits to the site because he does not own Halo 3 and realized that, and I quote, he has "nothing to contribute to any forums . . . and I'm fed up with all the [spam] in those forums . . . . So yeah, screw you guys. I'm going to 4chan." I'm willing to bet that nobody from Bungie even noticed dalmy's departure, even though many people in the Community did. But if Bungie were advertising on BNet, the loss of people like him -- a daily visitor and frequent forum poster -- would mean a loss of revenue.
Conclusion and Summary for those of you who always skip to the end of my posts
The end result of all of this is that, if advertisements were begun on the BNet website, I would expect BNet to become a lot more Community friendly thanks to BNet Community now being a revenue generator instead of an annoying group of forum regulars who whine about groups and search features. I would expect the BNet Community's desires to be much better supported by Bungie rather than ignored "cuz we're so busy working on Halo."
It's a quid-pro-quo, Sketch. I love Bungie to death and have no complaints about things as they currently are. But if you want to make money off of my presence here instead of just being my friend, you've got to give something back.
(Edit: apologies for the somewhat double-post -- I was having issues with my internet and ended up accidentally deleting a whole rack of changes to my first post, so I reposted it here with the changes made.)
[Edited on 12.12.2007 8:28 PM PST]