User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Making Ads Better: The Basics/@comment-1824272-20170117155514

I attended Community Connect this past summer, paid for entirely by Fandom (Wikia at the time), and I was shocked that myself and everyone else attending, despite there being so few of us, were paid solely through ad revenue. It may be surprising to a lot of people to hear that literally everything at Fandom is paid for through ads, but it's true. That's their sole source of revenue.

I've never had a problem with that. I doubt a lot of other users have too much of a problem with that as well. What I'm seeing a lot of is that our problems lie in visual-space-wasting, RAM-wasting, autoplaying video ads. Brandon, you just told us the two things that matter to advertisers: viewability and relevance. Neither of these things require that an ad autoplay a video.

In your example of a direct ad, with RE: The Final Chapter, you're displaying a module that allows us to click the video to play it, and the ad itself seems to be a relatively small-height banner that would be at the top of the page. This is acceptable because the video doesn't automatically play and destroy our browsers, and it doesn't take too much vertical space. If this is the kind of design that direct ads are going to be following in the future, and if such direct ads are going to be much more common in the future, then I'm all for it.

Except... I've noticed one annoying thing about design ads. When you guys create a design ad, '''you replace the wiki background on the left and right edges with an ad background. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.''' You can't give us the illusion of customization for our wiki and then take it away from us. This is something that I'd love to see changed in the future with direct ads, because when you start to literally block off certain aspects of customization is when users start to get really angry.