Personally I don't mind the ads, but here are some "helpful" suggestions:
1: Please MASK the url - if you move your mouse over the ad you get a long referal trade doubler url which just looks amateurish, I mean ANYONE can get a tradedoubler account, you don't have to be anything special. Simply masking it with "http://www.darkbasicpro.com/offers" or something would look better.
2: Whilst there are a lot of hits to the forums, we all know that the majority of them are repeat traffic from a few users, probably around 1000 max frequently pop in. Once they've seen the advert once, they'll probably ignore it having decided against the offer. Whilst I don't doubt you'll make a few sales from it, I seriously doubt that you'll get enough sales from one tradedoubler partner on this site to ever reach the $50 minimum payout
3: If you are going to promote offers like the Halflife 2 one, why not talk to Game either directly or through trade doubler to work out a script to sell it on the site as a Dark Basic branded offer - Having big adverts with GAME written on means that the majority of people who are interested in buying the product will simply remember its a "Game.com" offer, surf through the forums as they were intending, and visit Game.com directly when they have time later, probably bypassing your referal code anyways. An actual order page within darkbasicpro.com on the sales page would be a lot more likely to sell.
If you are going to have ads, rotating different offers is a good idea, especially considering the ammount of repeat traffic you get. I personally would suggest at least 20 of the same size (I like full sized skyscrapers, or an intriguing text link at the top of the page) and write a simple javascript to just choose a random one every visit. Therefore, no work updating them everyday, but they are different with every visit
Just my 2cents, ignore at will
(The real way to make money would be to ad loads of popups so you are guaranteed to get paid for every hit, imagine that 300,000*$0.05
but PLEASE don't do this unless you get really poor, it would seriously cheapen the site (but then you already know that
)
Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes, They got them hoppy legs & twitchy little noses,
And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
