Help ATS Recover With Your Contribution

As many members know by now, we've suffered some financial losses as the result of several sustained Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS). These attacks have been at levels well beyond automated mitigation available from our hosting provider, and very expensive to defend. As a result, we've been forced to obtain a short-term loan to cover operations and remain viable.

Every page of the site now has a ribbon at the top where you can select one of a few contribution amounts, and pay via PayPal.

And for the first time, I'm going to reveal a months-long frustration that we've not yet mentioned, that has significantly contributed to this unfortunate need.

Several months ago, AdSense arbitrarily disabled our ad account. We no longer have ads from one of our best and longest-running advertising suppliers. The initial cause was a photo of a girl in a bikini (seriously). We removed that and submitted our appeal. That appeal was rejected because of a thread about contraceptive alternatives (again, seriously). We removed that and submitted our appeal. That appeal was also rejected, using the trashed thread as the reason. We've spent hundreds of hours going through the site, looking for anything that might trigger their rejections, and kept submitting appeals. Each time, our appeal was rejected with new and very arbitrary reasons… reasons where we were able to find countless similar incidents in YouTube comments, a Google property. Doesn't matter.

There's lots of tales of woe of many sites, a lot of which contain large amounts of user-generated content like ATS, who have also recently lost their AdSense ads, with very similar stories. Just do a quick search, many sad stories.

Not that long ago, we were "AdSense Darlings." We never made a big deal about it here on ATS, but Google flew us to their headquarters so that we could give a presentation to their Online Partnerships Group on how we optimized our AdSense ads. Yes, we stood out as innovators. In fact, the director of their compliance group stood up during our presentation and congratulated us, in front of the 100's of people in the OPG audience, for having a stellar record of quality content that never received even one compliance alert.

Just a couple years after that, we're mud. Suspicious, no?

Our revenue will soon bounce back, as we've finally found suppliers of ads for the mobile web that will give ads that we can comfortably put in front of our mobile users. We had almost no ads on the mobile version of ATS for months, because the ad suppliers were not keeping pace with the rapid rise of the mobile web, and the available ads (at the time) were too disruptive for us to use.


This money will be used to repay the loan that's keeping us running, and if enough is received, engage experts to begin research into the next big ATS project, a Collaborative Community Platform for Citizen Journalism. The goal is to significantly modernize the concept of forums, integrate collaborative tools, redefine the user experience, and release the results as Free Open Source Software to enable a new wave of content that matters.


If you can't contribute, don't.

If you're short on cash, don't contribute.

If you can contribute, thank you. I promise you won't regret it.

hey skeptic, i will throw down either way but is $25 the lowest?
i didnt click the link yet as i am heading out to get stocking stuffers.
can it be any amount we want? know what i mean?
$15...$8.73

oh yeah, whoever adsense is sounds like they are total douche bags.
pulling ads over that?

unreal

Citizen journalism! Now that's a worthy endeavor, because journalist journalism seems to have declined.

a reply to: Grovit
To give some insight into the adsense issue:
www.zdnet.com...

So... ya gonna pay people who take the time to post and contribute to threads?

a reply to: Blister

The working bullet-list of features for the new platform concept contains a model for financially rewarding contributors for great content.

a reply to: Crakeur

Google ads may not be placed on pages with adult or mature content

what a crock man
everyone in the world uses google. funny how they say this but then their search engine can take you to some of the most disgusting [snip] you will ever see.

unreal

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

2 things....i'd love to donate, but i don't know that i can put down 25....there really should be an option to do 20, or 15, or whatever you feel you can spare at the time. every bit counts, and i'd rather get a ton of little donations, than hope for a few big ones..

additionally, i'd always suspected that you guys we heavy on the suppression of certain things, because of your ad providers....so essentially, we were being held hostage by your advertisers....i'd be willing to throw money at you guys regularly, if it ensured that kind of thing never happens again....and i'm sure i'm not the only one.

a reply to: Grovit

irony = using google to search for something that google does not allow on any site it places ads on.

a reply to: Daedalus

We've passed up on several direct-buy campaigns (big advertisers paying to run specifically on ATS) because they wanted certain topics removed or suppressed.

a reply to: Blister

Seriously?

Gimme a break dude, posting is half the fun. I want to contribute to keep ATS alive and well.

The timing is awful, especially for parents of young children.

Kickstarter or go fund me viable at all?

It appears that to AdWords, a website's content is up for re-classification as porn anytime -- and this isn't good news for online journalism.

Well that is pure,unadultered bullsnip.

Porn is usually their top displayed search results.

How long will the donation link be up?

I don't mind giving back.

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord
a reply to: Daedalus

We've passed up on several direct-buy campaigns (big advertisers paying to run specifically on ATS) because they wanted certain topics removed or suppressed.

There's a thread I'd LOVE to read.

Here's my "order confirmation" number 5BA61565J8105581K. I hope I don't get banned anytime soon. Long Live ATS!!!!

a reply to: abe froman

Most of the time, it was topics highly critical of Obama. And as far as I can recall, in one case, it was a thread exposing something about Free Masons… I forget the specifics.

We never removed content that didn't run afoul of the Terms and Conditions simply to satisfy an advertiser.




The two threads discussed in the opening post did go a little too far into sexual innuendo and suggestions.

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

and i applaud you and the team for that....but is death by a thousand cuts any better?

ignorance is ignorance.

and i see you added different contributor levels...good deal. i'll drop some money on you guys in a couple of days..

a reply to: abe froman

there's also Paetreon..seems to be really popular with content creators...

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

What may help your campaign is to tell us all how much you need and where you are currently to pay off the loan? Everyone wants to be a part of the hero aspect! But this may help, also making the donation amount any would also help if that is true what above posters said. I haven't had a chance to look yet but I will...

Ray, not cool.

a reply to: Daedalus

SAVE FERRIS !!!