Why This Site Has Adverts

Parsimonious has historically been one of the busiest sites in the Sims community, heavy international traffic (due to no text in the navigation) and equally heavy bandwidth usage (often between 100-150Gb per day) means that costs have always been disproportionately high for it's relatively small size.

Since early on in the site's history I have sold space on the site to help ease the costs greatly (without it Parsimonious would have disappeared a long time ago). Of course this only works if visitors (thats you!) unblock the ads when viewing the site! To date more than $60,000 has been paid out in hardware setup and maintainance, security expenses, bandwidth and hosting fees. Visitor donations have made up less than $3000 over the same 9 year period so you can see how vital having advertising income is.

What type of Adverts do we allow?

The website is aimed at a general audience over 12 years old (the Sims games are typically rated 12+ or 13+ across most of the world)

Most of the time I'm not always aware of precisely what ads are being shown on the site - it is often impractical and far too time consuming to check through the previews of all the ads that might be served (especially since some networks will allow companies to update their ad content after a campaign has started), but I have tried to ban some problematic ad categories where possible. This means you are very unlikely to ever see the following types of material advertised on this site:

Obviously if you do find an ad which is offensive then please contact me and let me know, it is very helpful if you can provide a screen shot of the ad, the URL of the website or company name, some details that help me to track it down (unfortunately a vague description isn't very helpful as often the advert inventory can run to tens of thousands of different adverts in any given month). Please note that I will not ban ads for mainstream political parties around election time, nor will I 'pick sides'.

In general I have been making an effort to also ban adverts which have videos which play sound automatically (non-user initated audio as it's known in the biz!). I have even closed one of our accounts with a network we used successfully for over 8 years because their system banning this type of advertising did not work properly and they kept slipping through. Unfortunately it does seem to be increasingly common as a form of advertising and I am having little success getting them all off the site. If you do encounter one then you can usually find a stop/pause or mute option on the ad which doesn't count as a click, otherwise try turning your computer's sound off when browsing (this is after all a common problem affecting all sites with advertising, not just this one!).

If You Represent an Ad Network

I get a lot of unsolicited messages from representatives of Ad Networks, it will harm your chances of my creating an account with your organization if you spam me! Certainly if I do set up an account, but your network can't deliver on the promises you made, I shall not hesitate to tell the hundreds of thousands of visitors Parsimonious has (a huge number of whom have their own sites and blogs) just how utterly rubbish your network really is.

Before you email and insist that your network really is the bee's knees please be aware of the following:

Once you have read and inwardly digested the notes above you may contact me directly by emailing webmistress@parsimonious.org with the subject line 'Advertising Enquiry' (yes this is a test to see if you are able to follow instructions). I expect a full and thorough proposal which addresses the issues I have raised and NOT a standard lazy-arsed proforma.

Buying Advertising Space Directly

Parsimonious does not have it's own ad serving system in place. It is not practical when factoring in legal fees to draft appropriate terms and conditions, dealing with tax obligations for the sale of goods and services and paying an engineer to program and maintain the code that would run the ad system.

It would result in higher CPM costs than Google Adwords - which is why it is recommended that you use Google Adwords if you want to run a targetted campaign on Parsimonious.

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