Subtitles of the Movie

In this segment let's talk about advertising best practices for your wiki. Number one and most important, less is more. You don't want people to check out your wiki to be looking for some particular piece of information and just the first thing they see be tons of advertising, it's really going to turn them off. So remember less is more. Evaluate how you want your wiki to be viewed, if you want your wiki to be viewed as a piece of information or place of real integrity you really need to look at keeping the advertising to a minimum. If you do decide to keep advertising in your wiki, consider trusted sources such as Google ad sense. Remember advertising creates strong emotion in your users, some users quite frankly are horribly turned off by advertising, most won't care and they'll understand why you're doing it, if you're wanting to pay your hosting costs or so on and so forth. Maybe you're just wanting to make a little extra money to supplement your income and most people are going to want to understand that, but some are not and it's going to create string emotions in your users. So just keep that in mind. You need to regularly control your advertisements to ensure that they meet your standards. If you are trying to keep a family friendly wiki, you might want to make sure that the advertisements that are being posted by your advertiser don't contain adult content. So you need to be constantly patrolling your pages to ensure that the ad meet your standards. Finally check out the layouts of your favorite sites for inspirations. See if their advertising is non intrusive, targeted and interesting. By targeted you can choose for example if you have a wiki that is targeted for a particular topic, to have advertisements that are targeted to that particular topic. So if you have a knitting wiki you don't want to have maybe something about sports on there. Not to say knitting users can't enjoy sports, but they might find the place that they can buy wholesale yarn more interesting then a place where they can buy sports tickets. Just think. So I'm going to switch over to my browser here, which is firefox on the Apple Macintosh and I'm on Wikipedia, the star wars wiki. Now this is hosted on wikia, which is a wiki farm that is owned by the WikiMedia foundation and they do allow advertising to be embedded. Now a lot of wiki farms will have advertising that you can either turn on or turn off for a paid amount per month and that's how they recoup their costs of hosting your wiki and you'll see on the right hand side of the screen that they have a rather large AT and T advertisement. So the first thing that you see when you come to this wiki could be the wiki content or it could be the advertisement and that may bother you and it may not. So ultimately as with everything, you need to decide what you want and try to find a setting or a feature that works for you and this will be very dependent on your wiki software which wiki farm you choose. So again research your options and see which one works best for your needs.