How To Get Ahead in Advertising

As most of you (I'm looking at you, AdBlockers) might have noticed, iCheckMovies is now featuring ads. As we can imagine, this might strike you as annoying. It's a necessary evil though.

Let us tell you why.

Free as in beer

iCheckMovies is a free website. It will always be for your most basic checking needs. However, it's development and hosting costs us a lot of time and some money. Up until now, we've always paid for the server costs ourselves, with the help of a few very kind donors.

Unfortunately, we cannot maintain this model any longer: our servers are crumbling under thousands of checks, recommendations, messages and new members. Plus, it distracts us from development of a better iCheckMovies.

Marijn is working his butt off to keep our serves up and running (evidence), but he can no longer do this with just optimizing, monitoring, restarting and killing scripts.

He needs more power. He needs more hardware. And thus, we need money.

Money, money, money, money…

…money! But how?

There are several ways to earn money with a website, all of which are very hard. Luckily, we have a great community that is very true to the website. (Yes, you!) A lot of you come along very often to do your daily (weekly, monthly) checking. Which creates a lot of pageviews, that we can (at least partly) translate to income. We do this by introducing ads to the website.

Every time an ad is shown and/or clicked on, we earn a tiny bit of money. Hopefully, all these tiny bits combine to relieve our burden (at least a little).

So if you're not using AdBlock, you're already helping us. For which we thank you!

The second thing we can (and will) do, is introducing premium accounts. We will introduce these in iCheckMovies 2.0, which is coming to you this summer. Basically, this means paying members have access to more great features than non-paying members. More about that later.

Next up

We will be tweaking ad placement in the coming weeks, to ensure an optimum balance of user experience and income. If you have any feedback, ideas or other thoughts on this, don't hesitate to send us a message.

In the meantime, we are working hard on finishing the next big version of iCheckMovies. Erik is programming like a madman (you should see him, sometimes he scares us), Marijn will assist him, while keeping our servers alive, and Piet is busy making version 2.0 the most useable and beautiful iCheckMovies you have ever experienced.

Happy checking!