Proposal for policy on advertisements

In order to pay the costs of running the site, and to obtain some money for prizes of contests etc., the website may carry some advertisements. Below, there is a proposal for the rules we follow for advertisements.

Form of advertisements

In order to have webpages not take too long to load, the size of a banner (in kB) should be at most .... . We also may have clearly distinguisable text advertisements with link to an advertisers website. Also:

Not too many advertisements on any page, i.e., at most one banner, and, perhaps except for the whatsnew.html, at most one ad in general per page.
Banners e.g. of the size 486x60 pixels.

Placement of advertisements

General rule:

People that contribute a text must give permission before an advertisement is placed on the webpage with their text.

Thus, we may have advertisements on:

The index pages and what's new pages.
Webpages made by people that give permission to place an ad there.

We have no advertisements on:

Webpages with texts written by people that did not give permission to place an ad there. This includes people that cannot be contacted for such permission, people that do not answer a question to give permission, and people that request that no ad is placed on their webpage.
Webpages that describe a competing product. E.g., on a webpage with a review of a certain commercial chess variant, we will not place a banner for another commercial chess variant. This only as far as it is technically possible (e.g., it may be hard to avoid when some script is used with rotating banners.)

The ad-banners are placed at the top of a webpage, below the logo. The placement of the ad on the whatsnew.html webpage in beginning December 1999 is an example on how this is done.

Acceptable advertisements

The graphic to place on the webpage, and the webpage that an advertisement links to should be acceptable: it should be suitable for children to view, not contain racism, occultism, or any suppression of minorities, etc. As a rule, when the content would be rated with the rules of RSAC, then it should get ratings: n0, s0, l0 or l1, v0 or v1.

When the contents of a website change during the time we carry an advertisement such that it becomes unsuitable to link to, we can remove the advertisement without prior notice, giving a pro-ratio refund when this would be larger than ... dollars.

Costs of advertising

For every 1000 imprints of a banner (times a reader looks at a webpage where the banner is shown at the top of that webpage), 4 US dollars. (I.e., a CPM of $4.

We also could change imprints to goods, e.g., a distributor of a chess variant game gives us a game (e.g., to use as a prize) and we carry his banner on the site. For this, the rate is a CPM of $6 in value, including postage. (E.g., when a game would cost $24 with $6 postage, this would amount to 5000 imprints.)

Remarks

With about 70.000 page views per month, I think this should give enough possibilities to secure the financial status of the website. Our purpose is not to earn a lot of money, but it would be good to have the income to pay the costs of our hosting firm, and have some additional money e.g. for prizes for contests.