[conspire] Serving ads on a Mediawiki site

[rogerchrisman at gmail.com]

Hi, I haven't posted in ages. Hello friends.

About two years ago I started serving ads on a Mediawiki wiki that I
run on a Linux webhost, Dathorn.com, that gets like 2000 visitors a
day.

First I tried Google Adsense. That didn't earn much, like 5 to 20
cents a day. Maybe I didn't have it set up correctly. I might try it
again some time. Nah, probably never.

Then I got an invitation from a representative at eZoic who offered to
set me up with them. He figured I would do better with them. I was a
basic eZoic member for like three months, getting about $1.50 a day
from the ads. Then they talked me into paying them $22 a month to be a
Premium eZoic member. I figured what's to lose, I'll just try it and
see. Ad revenue went up to like $3.00 a day. Then Covid19 hit. Ad
revenue went down to about $2.00 a day. But I found the eZoic system
complicated and difficult to tune and mostly ignored it. It placed
more ads than I wanted on my site, and in distracting places and
blinky manner. It is a hard monster to tame. I suspect it is never
going to serve ads in the discrete manner I would like. Now that I
want out of Premium eZoic, to save me $22 a month and hopefully tame
their crazed ad placement beast a bit, they seem to want an $88
"Annual Contract Cancellation Fee." I've been a paying eZoic Premium
member for 17 months already. I feel they should not try to charge me
a "cancellation" fee at this point. I've told them so. We'll see what
happens with that.

Full disclosure: I use Windows 10 to interface with the eZoic settings
using eZoic's Google Chrome extension. I don't think it works on Linux
Chrome. Kind of a pain really. But then, I use Windows 10 to play
Minecraft and do most of my interneting anyway. I start up in Xubuntu
(it's a dual boot installation on my Windows 10 box) when I want to
SSH into the webhost and tweek settings. I've got man pages and a
terminal in Xubuntu. That's brilliant, even if I'm not. In fact,
hosting this insane wiki is why I started learning Linux basics 21
years ago. And that is how I met you guys. So here's to insane 1s an
0s, wikis! And imagination run wild.

For some reason, when I startup Windows 10 after a session running my
desktop in Xubutu, the time of day is off by several hours and needs
to be re-synched. Any idea why that is? I may have asked this question
right here years ago. Time flys. I might have only imagined that.
Thoughts fly, too. Little fly, been somewhere interesting? (Pence's
head? Oh.)

So, I didn't label this thread off topic because my wiki serving the
ads is hosted on Linux. Guess what, eZoic mirrors my wiki in the cloud
somewhere on I don't know what operating system. They put the ads in
on the ... fly!

Roger
said wiki is at https://teflpedia.com if you are curious