page 715 – the cast piles up
I’m deeply vexed by the lateness of this page. I know, I know, it’s not much later than any of the other comics over the past few weeks, but that’s the problem. I was all jazzed up to have this week be when Far Out There FINALLY got back to updating right at the stroke of Midnight, like the old days. I even spent most of the weekend pounding out an extra large pile of rough drafts so I’d be that much farther ahead on drawing the actual pages. Everything was on schedule… and then I woke up Sunday morning with a big heaping helping of the Cold that’s been going around town lately. Somehow, two straight days of coughing up bits of lung, being all achy from fever, and tripping out on cold medicine didn’t leave me feeling very creative, and here we are with yet another mid-morning update. Booooooooooo.
Well, anyway, we got a New Voting Incentive, and while we’re on that topic I AM SO SORRY I DIDN’T UPDATE THE INCENTIVE GALLERY BEFORE NOW! I swear I thought I’d done it at least ONCE this year, but NOPE! Well, it’s all up to date now, so if you wanna get caught up on the silly doodles you’ve missed over the past few months, head over to the Goodies page and check the gallery out!
One more thing that I kinda hate to bring up, but it’s getting to be a problem: if any of you guys are using an ad blocker, could you please make sure it’s turned off for this site? The ad views have really plummeted over the past few weeks, even though the actual site traffic’s been pretty consistent, and the only sense I can make of it is if a lot of people started blocking the ads recently. It kinda matters, since that meager ad review is the only way I can afford to buy ad space of my own on other pages. So, if you haven’t already, could you turn ’em off for this site?
If it helps, the only ad on this page that’s “mine” is the one on the very bottom of the page, where you can easily ignore it. The more obnoxious ads around the comic itself are actually SmackJeeves’, and you don’t even need an ad blocker to make those go away. If you’re logged in with a SJ account, those ads’ll disappear automatically! How cool is that? Again, sorry to bring that crap up, but it’s the only way I could figure this weirdness out.
(Historical Notes: If I remember correctly, the drop in ad traffic turned out to be less a case of people using ad blockers and more a case of Project Wonderful training its analytics gremlins to be better at telling the difference between actual human beings looking at a page and bots crawling the web for search engines or whatever. Also, I STILL hate having to talk about that sort of thing.)
Re: historical notes, I’ve always been suspicious of ad sites saying they’re better at filtering out bots. Maybe they are, but money motive isn’t on the side of more accurate filtering, it’s on the side of more aggressive filtering. Or maybe I’m just cynical.
Well, I’m definitely cynical. I could still be wrong, though.
See, the TRULY cynical thing is to just not even care anymore because the whole clearly isn’t working… which is fair, seeing as how Project Wonderful isn’t even around anymore.
But seriously, the filtering thing is a matter of the people paying for ads not wanting to spend money on “views” that are just bots who won’t bring them more business. The Internet as a whole is still struggling with figuring out how much being seen is actually “worth,” so the people trying to monetize web traffic are desperate to make it sound like the money spent on them will have the maximum return.