Today I forked, made some experimental changes and installed the Discourse plugin to display ads.
Configured the plugin to only show ads to unregistered users and made a few tweaks to encourage visitors to login. Worked on the plugin live (a slow process) to get the format to look better than the official plugin from Discourse.
Modified Discourse Advertising Plugin (WIP)
This site does not get enough traffic to generate any "tangible" ad revenue; but I hope we can at least encourage guests to register and maybe someday, the guest ads will pay for hosting.
It's way too early in this experiment to draw any conclusions. However, the indications so far are:
Running display ads may not result in a tangible uptick in signups.
The monthly revenue generated by display ads at this Discourse forum would barely buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
As far as display ad revenue, the Discourse SPA (single page application) performs extremely poor compared to non-SPA forums (our original site) in all areas (SEO, ad impressions served, etc)**.
We will keep running this experiment for the time being; but if we do not see any noticeable increase in sign ups and the potential monthly display ad revenue is so low that it would barely buy a Starbucks coffee; we will kill this experiment running display ads (for guest visitors only) on our Discourse-based forum.
Thank you.
Footnote
** I have post a number of times why SPA web applications like Discourse suffer from poor SEO and generate very dissatisfactory ad revenue; but so far I have been surprised how bad it actually is (so far) in this experiment. If running display ads do not result in a noticeable uptick in signups and logged in users, I will definitely kill running display ads for guests on this site.
For Discourse sys admins who happen to stumble along here. Just a few points:
Google does on see follow-on activity (after the initial Discourse SPA load) as a "page view". This fact greatly distorts how Google views ad delivery, so it seems.
My working theory is that Google does not see activity inside the Discourse SPA as "page views" and this caused the Discourse SPA to not property display ads because Google expects a new "page view" when in fact, it looks more like a page refresh instead of a page view.
I have not done a complete analysis; however, it's easy to see that Google Ad Manager is not recording and serving ads in the same way as a LAMP forum application which is not based on the SPA model.
I will post back more observations over time. My generally impressions so far confirms my thoughts last year - Discourse is not suitable for serving display ads if you want to actually generate "meaningful" ad revenue from a Discourse site.
On the other hands, many end users (forum users) seem to love the way the Discourse works as a SPA.
So far, I have seen no indication that running display ads on this Discourse site will results in (1) an increase of new member signs up or (2) any tangible ad revenue.
In other words, four days into this experiment, we have not seen any positive results for running display ads on this Discourse SPA.
After five days of testing, I disabled all display ads for guest on mobile, because there was close to zero value in those ads:
No noticeable uptick in new registered users.
No useful ad revenue.
Will continue testing with guests on the desktop, but my prediction is that there is little to no value in running display ads in the Discourse SPA and I'll disable those soon.
After nearly three weeks of running display ads using the official Discourse ad plugin, we can confirm all our previous views based on SEO analysis of single page application (SPA) web sites.
Discourse is the worst performing web-site, from an ad revenue perspective, of any of the many web-sites we have managed over the years. Summary:
Google "sees" the initial page load as a "page view" but subsequent views after the initial page load of the SPA application is not "seen" as a "page view".
The problem above influences other aspects of ad serving including important Google Ad Manager (GAM) feedback and statistics, resulting in poor GAM ad serving performance.
Our legacy site, www.unix.com has significantly better SEO and display ad performance compared to this Discourse SPA site, even two years after migration to this new site. I expected display ad revenue to be poor, but I had no idea it would be this bad. It's all a function of Discourse as a SPA.
The legacy site also was busier from a user perspective. Even thought our original site was a "clunky" (not modern) vBulletin 3.x (long end-of-lfe) LAMP site, the number of active users who logged in and created content was considerably higher.
This Discourse SPA is less buggy, the code is well supported, and users seem to like it.
We did not see any practical increase in new member sign-ups showing display ads to guests.
Writing plugins and extending the functionality of LAMP forums is much easier than an Ember-based Javascript SPA like Discourse. Personally, after two years running, I like the Ruby on Rails backend, but I loath the heavy SPA Ember-Javascript front end.
This concludes our experiment running display ads for guest users on the Discourse SPA.
We have already disabled the Discourse Ad plugin and this plugin will remain disabled until further notice.
Bottom Line:
No display ads are being served to guest users anymore.
