Advertising on our Site

Text Ads

We welcome advertisers who want to show their support for avalanche safety and education at a low cost.

When you advertise on Avalanche-Center.org the fees you pay go directly and entirely to us, and are used to support our non-profit avalanche information and education services. We charge a simple, low, flat fee for your ad to run for a chosen amount of time - from one week to one year.

The avalanche center offers paid advertising in the form of text ads only, we do not have banner ads or any other kind of paid advertising.

Flat Rates:

• $20 for one month
• $45 for three months
• $75 for six months
• $120 for one year

You can log in and change your own ad text at any time. Ads run on a set of pages selected for you geographic area and/or product(s). You may request a change in this "ad zone" any time if you wish to.

Ads and Content

The internet has become all about advertising, and most sites now are optimized to drive ad views for revenue. The Avalanche Center remains a true non-profit low budget operation, and while we need some revenue our content is not influenced by advertising or product sales in any way. (We do have a store with products but we carry every brand which is feasible and do not promote or endorse any in the interest of profit margin or any other factor.)

Your ad will show our visitors and users that you support our cause and our efforts, which they value. We understand this is hard to put a value on, and if the cost was very high we would understand any reservations you may have. So we keep the rates very low in order to focus on a show of support and some visibility rather than selling views or clicks.

Registering to Run an Ad (2-3 minutes or less)

You can sign up to run ads in about 2-3 minutes on the Registration Page. All you really need is the New User info in the top section. The Advertisement Details section allows you to enter ad text, but it will not appear until its activated and it can be changed any time. So if you want to type in any kind of place holder information during registration that's fine. We won't activate it until you have final text in place. Of course, if you know what you want the ad to initially say then go ahead and get it started running right away.

Why we run our own ads, why we don't waste time chasing and counting valid clicks, and why you shouldn't waste your time and money on programs that do operate on a per-click basis.

We manage and serve ads on our own server, we do not display any ads through Google Adwords or the Yahoo Advertising Network or any other program. Our experiences with these programs in the past, both publishing ads and purchasing ads, has led us to believe these are little more than scams. There is no accountability - advertisers have inadequate control over where ads are shown or the quality of traffic generated and publishers have been routinely terminated for "invalid clicks" with no indication of what that meant or how it was determined. The pay-per-click model is inherently prone to fraud and the services like Google and Yahoo have little incentive to make the large investment of time and money to really prevent it. They profit from it.

[Business week published an excellent article on Click Fraud. Anyone using or planning to use Google Adwords or the Yahoo equivalent should read this.] [Update - Our original link went bad and we found several others, including this one. Just search for Business Week and Click Fraud. And while the particulars change over time the fundamental problem remains - it takes a lot of oversight and time and money to avoid being ripped off.]

www.avalanche-center.org