There are currently no ads running anywhere on Quarter to Three, either on the forums or the front page. This is the result of several factors. Although I felt our previous ad network was mostly doing a good job, this site was just too far down the totem pole to merit so much as a reply email from them, much less the payments we were owed. Furthermore, they were incapable of preventing occasional abusive ads. I am astonished that an ad network can’t make the simple promise to not allow ads that redirect users. This happened all too frequently for mobile users, and it was starting to happen to PC users. That’s intolerable. Finally, everyone’s generosity with the Patreon campaign and Amazon referrals has more than made up for what we were supposed to be getting from ads.
I can’t promise that we’ll never try ads again with another network, but for the foreseeable future, Quarter to Three is 100% advertising free. Whew. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to just cut the whole thing loose. So to celebrate – w00t! – I hope you’ll consider clicking the Patron logo at the top of the page or maybe just use an Amazon link from this site to buy yourself something nice this Christmas! Like so…
Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s even seeing this post. It’s been an interesting year and I couldn’t be happier with how things are turning out for us.
-Tom
P.S. In case you didn’t know, you can unpin this post by clicking the thumbtack icon.
The automatic Amazon referral link behavior on this forum is awesome. I know it’s just adding “?tag=qt3-20” to links, but on mobile, that was always a pain.
I’d still love to have a generic Amazon link at the top of the forum. Maybe there’s a way to make it opt-in so that people that don’t want to see it don’t have to. I’d much rather have that there than the Patreon link, but maybe I’m in the minority.
I wish I had known about creating my own Amazon Qt3 referral shortcut sooner because I’ve bought a lot of stuff on Amazon over the years. I’m glad things are working out Tom!
There’s an Amazon box on the front page. You can either use it to search for something specific, or just click it to go to Amazon.com, and anything you buy during that session will be credited to this site. Or you can create or use a link someone makes here. As per this thread, we sort of “hijack” any posted links by appending our referral tag. You can also use that thread as a shopping catalog. Just scroll down and browse the cool stuff we’ve linked!
Anything you buy relatively soon after you visit the link gets credited just the same as using the other methods, but since i use my bookmark bar pretty heavily for web navigation, this works best for me :)
I too would love Armando’s generic Amazon link next to the Patreon link but I will settle for a bookmark instead in the meantime. It’s just easy sometimes to forget about it and having it in front of me when I visit QT3 would help to remember it.
No. Apparently Tom would have to set up affiliate status in all the various countries and then deal with the complexities of moving money back to the US. Kind of like what Apple has to deal with, writ small. I’d love for him to get Canada going, because I am considering a PS4 Pro in combo with a VR bundle in the near future and I’d love for Tom to get some of that.
