A sad day indeed. Stardock announced that Textbanners.net will stop in January 2005. I must say that I am disapointed that it did not work out. I had much hope for the program such that it would bring more revenue to WinCustomize (and therefor more servers). Lately, I have devised a way to use TextBanners.ner and Google Ads together and planned on having (or should I say conducting) an experiment with my current progect Search Advertising (current off-line until I can pay that bill UNEMPLOYMENT SUCKS). using both text ad services.
Why?
For me, Textbanners is more of a community service. It was something that anyone can get into and know exactly where it was going. I wished more sites signed up for it. Take DeviantArt and its latest layout. I think it is a better layout than the previous ads but other think it is more abtrusive. If they used text banners, I think many people would have tolorated it more because the people advertising would have been from the community.
Its a hard sell, I'll admit. How it would have worked on my site was that there would be an area JUST for community announcements. You could announce almost whatever from your eBay sale, to a birthday or annivarsary. Maybe shout out something you read somewhere or a blog post you made.
All this amongst regualar ads for related services and products; all relevant and most of all useful.
On the announcments page in piticular, you could search through each ad for whatever you are looking for or, if you don't see what you like, refresh the page and search again. Sort of like a 'wonder what will come up next that is interesting' sort of thing.
Then with other pages like SPECIALS, Textbanners would show stuff like JoeUser featured blog posts, maybe someones wishing someone else good luck on a somethig, a program release...
Well, this was what I was thinking. The idea is much more detailed then what I wrote above and has more placement associations.
If the experiment was even slightly successful, I would have expanded it and asked other web developers on art and skin sites to give it a shot for subscribers and those who have more than 10,000 downloads.
I think it would have worked. Plus Textbanners.net, to me, was easier to make work that Google is. Plus, you can put multiple ads on one page, unlike Google (unless you use iframes). Textbanners uses iframes natively so all you have to do is place the code in the page.
With the announments page and message board, special pages and the evetual involvement of other sites in the community, i think Textbanners.net could have been a great small community ad and announcment service.