Why we have Advertising

As a magazine website published by a non profit organisation you may wonder why we have advertising. Although we don't have a need to create a profit from this site, in order for it to exist we need to be able to cover a wide range of costs including:-

• website registrations

• website hosting, with expansion capability both in number of pages and number of visitors

• promotion costs, advertising, Public Relations team, without this few would discover it and be able to get the benefits we can provide

• the cost of encouraging and involving as many people as we can to become involved

• others we have yet to discover.

So how, we asked ourselves could we fund this in a way that had stability, we didn't want to have to rely in the long term, on a small number of founding sponsors. The options included:-

• Subscriptions from users, but this would cut down the use, and make it less accessible.

• Grants, but while we went looking for these, we would not have time to expand it, and we would be likely to have to change its character to suit these objectives.

• Advertising, but we would need people to sell it.

• Delegate the problem to someone else.

Another consideration in our choice of methods was that we wanted to keep this as a non commercial website, and by doing so, be able to use a lot of the publicly available material that is able to be used without charge on non commercial websites, this includes some of the images that appear under the creative commons licences.

We decided that the best option in our case was to delegate the problem to someone else, and to allow them to cover their costs by selling advertising. We have, however, set limits on what is allowed so as to be good for the magazine.

The advertising is limited to a banner at the top, a skyscraper down the side and some additional items at the end of the page, plus some buttons after the end of the normal menus. Advertisements per page is limited and they will not be in the middle of articles and the like, but neatly around the borders.  Where possible these advertisements will be relevant to the interest you are likely to have, so may be helpful to you.

A section we had wanted to develop, but did not have the time to do, was a classified section and as this could be directly linked to the advertising, this section could be completely delegated.

Advertisers mostly provide useful services and are valued members of the photographic community, in many cases with a lot of expertise, for them the cost of telling people what they have on offer is a major part of their costs. Some may also be contributors in magazines, and have a range of other ways to make themselves known. For them this website should also be useful, and we wanted to offer them the opportunity to get their message out to their potential clients.  The advertising rate structure has been devised, not only to represent a better value than other advertising, but also to offer many options so that even the advertiser with the most restricted budget or the person wanting to try internet advertising for the first time, can find an option that is right for them.

Splitting out the advertising, also separates the editorial and advertising, and those who advertise, with the exception of advertorials have no direct input or affect on what we have to say. You won't therefore get the article you may see in some places that are just there as a support for advertising, and from the way the text is written you can, at times, see it was written by the advertiser rather than the publication or website.

We hope you will agree that this provides a model that allows this non profit magazine website to develop and grow, be promoted and offer the most for the users. We also hope that you will check out many of the advertisers to see if what they have on offer could be of use to you.

Potential Advertisers - see the subweb we have had put together that explains what is available to you.

.