Service Status
It’s now been a full 3 months since we removed ads from T35 hosting member pages… Time to do a follow up test and see how we did! To back up a little bit, the removal of all ads from member pages was one of the biggest decisions I have ever made at T35 Hosting. Pop-up Ads (and Banner Ads before them) have been the primary driver of revenue at T35 since the beginning.
In fact, without the ads, we can’t even cover our costs and the issue of sustainability comes into question. Unfrtonuatly, removing ads was perhaps the only way to stay competitive and try to grow the business while facing increased competition from the likes of google and yahoo.
Fortunately, we came up with a multi-pronged solution to supplement revenue enough to keep the company running. The new plan involved increased monetization of our 404-not-found pages while at the same time banking on an increase in member count. We also decided to keep our “hosted by t35” footer text link and supplementing it with several other small links.
These new ads did not even come close to replacing pop-up revenue, but the hope of this bold plan was to increase membership and overall traffic to offset the loss of revenue. So enough with all of this talk… let’s see the results!
Although traffic didn’t increase as much as expected, we still saw a decent boost! Hopefully the increase continues in the upcoming months. Was removing ads a good decision? Well, I can tell you that all of our members have been ecstatic about the removal of the ads. At the same time, daily sign ups are at an all time high. Was this a good decision? Only time will tell. For the time being, I am satisfied with the preliminary results.