For those of you who don't know what this is about, see Jagex's
Fansite Support Information topic on the RuneScape official forums. We just want you guys to know the direction we are taking with regards to that.
RSBandB is currently listed as a "Silver" level fansite, which is completely fine with us. From what they say on there, the only thing keeping us from being a "Gold" level site is the gaming advertisements we have on our site.
Ever since we started this site, we have always made keeping RWT ads off our site a big priority, and have also tried to block ads for direct competitors to RuneScape (like other MMOs). During the months of April and May we also tested blocking all other ads related to Gaming that we could to see if we could do it without seeing a big drop in advertising revenue.
As you may have noticed, ads related to gaming have been back on the site for this whole month, and the reason for that is that Shane and I have determined we cannot financially sustain this site with the reduced revenue. We have not made a profit on running this site since 2005 when RuneHQ graciously took on hosting us for a short time at a lower price than what was standard for hosting at the time. Even then it was a small profit, and it has long since been used up in paying for our hosting over the years. The main reason we left them was because we wanted to grow as our own fansite/community based on RuneScape and not be a leech off an existing fansite.
With the near 30% reduced revenue we observed without gaming adverts, we do not feel we would be able to keep running this site for much longer if we kept it like that. We also would not like to put the extra financial burden onto the community members by threatening to close down, so we enabled all gaming adverts.
Jagex's desire for keeping gaming adverts off fan sites is very reasonable, they don't want to advertise sites which in turn advertise other games because it
may in turn take away from their business. In reality, they really don't have anything to worry about. No other games come close to being as well developed or full featured on their platform of browser based games as RuneScape does. People will continue to come back to RuneScape's vast worlds to explore and ever-expanding gameplay elements because of it's browser based core. It doesn't make much sense for us to reduce our revenue in order to appease them for almost no benefit to us. We do not run our site as a business unlike some of the other fansites, it is merely a hobby for Shane and myself, but there are some decisions that have to be made in the manner of business like this one.
We have received a few links off the Jagex twitter accounts to our site for informer articles or new episodes of the podcast, but according to our server logs, each of their links has only brought in a couple hundred viewers at the most. Even if jagex promoted stuff from our site on twitter more often, the extra viewers are not making up the advertising revenue lost from not having gaming ads. This raises another question, why is jagex only doing this on twitter? Why not take a more official means to supporting fan sites, as in on their own site?
We're still not even completely sure Jagex is committed to this fansite support, they have moved the fansite support thread away from the populated General forum to "Contact Us". It also feels more like they are just doing this because they feel they have to. They want to support clans, but if they are supporting clans, they also must support fansites because they often have larger communities than most clans, right? They previously spent 9 years trying hard to not officially get involved in fansites, why start now?
Even if we are making the wrong decision here, it seems there are no repercussions to it as there are fan sites on the supported list that have previously made no efforts to block RWTing ads. Still, we will continue to try out new advertisers and if we ever find we can support this site exclusively from advertising without gaming ads, we will revisit this issue. It's probable that Jagex would still not even be happy with us blocking gaming advertisements because of the non-rs gaming events we hold to further enhance the community bonds when not playing RuneScape, or the gaming articles on the informer, both of which are small compared to their RS equivalents. We know that most people don't only play one game so these extra events and articles are to cater to some of the other interests of the community.
Our site will remain focused on RuneScape with new and innovative features being developed by Shane and myself with the support of our staff members. You can also look forward to our site's 6th birthday coming this August, so there will be some big RuneScape events announced for that. And as always, if you ever come across a RWTing ad on RSBandB or RuneWire anywhere, please report it to me by
private message on the forums or through our
site feedback.