Advertise - Ad Scheme Information

Simple, yet effective...

We've based our advertising scheme on the CPM structure (cost-per-thousand impressions). This means you pay a fixed amount for every 1,000 times your advert is displayed on the site, removing the guesswork involved when trying to calculate how far your money is going (for example, when paying a flat rate per week or per month). Even if the website has a low-traffic month, you don't lose out - your advert will simply run for longer, until we've fulfilled our commitment to you. We currently offer three levels of advertising - the more you purchase, the lower the CPM - check our advertising rates for more information.

'Non-human' visitors

One of the reasons our advertising scheme stands out from the rest is the way we detect which visitors to the site are human, and which are not - something many websites do not even consider. The majority of 'non-human' visitors are search engine robots, such as Google and Yahoo, simply crawling our site for inclusion in their search index. Any time we believe that an advert has been shown to a robot, we will not count it against your advertising balance. As mentioned on our Advertising homepage, non-human traffic can account for up to 80% of all visits to some websites - that's potentially 80% of your budget gone to waste if this feature isn't offered.

Please note that we do not change the page content or advert that is displayed when we detect a non-human visitor to the site - we simply use the information to decide whether or not we should deduct from your advertising balance. Your advert will still be shown to search engines and other web crawlers, free of charge.

If you currently advertise on other websites, we recommend you make periodic checks on how much you are paying per thousand impressions (CPM) to human visitors, and compare that to our advertising rates.

Ad rotation

All active advertisers will have their adverts shown in an rotation system. This is run on a per-page-view basis, and is intended to stimulate more interest from visitors by varying the content that's presented to them each time a new page is displayed.

Advert specification

All ad spaces on this site are currently in the 'Wide Skyscraper' format, as shown on the left of this page. This is one of several industry standard sizes for adverts on the web, and measuring 160 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall, is also one of the most generous and eye-catching formats of it's type. Supported files formats are JPEG, PNG and GIF, with a maximum file size of 50Kb. Adverts must not contain rapid flashing or any other elements that are designed to overly distract the viewer. An ad creation service is available if you have not previously advertised in this format.