Why we have Sponsored Posts on homepage

**StevenW** · 12-30-2012

Hi all,

Hope you've had a great Christmas and looking forward to the new year.

I just wanted to make you all aware that PSU does occasionally feature SPONSORED POSTS. These are paid-for posts by certain companies that help us pay for our hosting and enable staff to go to events so that we can produce up-to-date news.

These SPONSORED POSTS are not frequent. In 2012, we had four posts of this kind throughout the year and sent out two newsletters that had adverts within them.

There's currently a SPONSORED POST by Samsung on the main homepage. You'll notice that it clearly states that it's SPONSORED within the headline and confirms that it was sponsored by Samsung at the end. They rarely stay on the homepage for more than one day and then you won't see them again.

Our staff work tirelessly to make PSU as good as possible and posts like this allow us to improve the site technically and make changes where they're needed. I wanted to make it clear that we have no intention of making this a regular occurrence and that we never have, or would have, videogame-related sponsored posts. These adverts in no way impact on our regular content.

If anyone has any questions or concerns about this please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll come back to you as soon as possible.

**Cybertox** · 12-30-2012

Better let us know when the forum will get finally fixed and will properly function.

**claud3** · 12-30-2012

Originally Posted by StevenW

Hi all,

Hope you've had a great Christmas and looking forward to the new year.

I just wanted to make you all aware that PSU does occasionally feature SPONSORED POSTS. These are paid-for posts by certain companies that help us pay for our hosting and enable staff to go to events so that we can produce up-to-date news.

These SPONSORED POSTS are not frequent. In 2012, we had four posts of this kind throughout the year and sent out two newsletters that had adverts within them.

There's currently a SPONSORED POST by Samsung on the main homepage. You'll notice that it clearly states that it's SPONSORED within the headline and confirms that it was sponsored by Samsung at the end. They rarely stay on the homepage for more than one day and then you won't see them again.

Our staff work tirelessly to make PSU as good as possible and posts like this allow us to improve the site technically and make changes where they're needed. I wanted to make it clear that we have no intention of making this a regular occurrence and that we never have, or would have, videogame-related sponsored posts. These adverts in no way impact on our regular content.

If anyone has any questions or concerns about this please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll come back to you as soon as possible.

no problem mate, that's nice to know and i hope you get even more to do this kind of thing

**T0PGUN** · 12-30-2012

You dont need to click them so they're no problem to me.

(i did click btw

)

**Kuro** · 12-30-2012

Ok cool. Thanks for the heads up!

**Fenix** · 12-30-2012

Originally Posted by Cybertox

Better let us know when the forum will get finally fixed and will properly function.

There are threads for this, this isnt one. Let PSU do what they have to do, if these sponsored posts could help make fixes happen faster I say do them more frequently.

**Blacksite** · 12-30-2012

I have a feeling that the sponsored posts, which are said to expire the next day, will get more comments than some of the other news articles. =P

But thanks for letting us know.

**DeviousOne** · 12-31-2012

Time to get paid lol

**AaronSOLDIER** · 12-31-2012

I think it's stupid tbh, like Cybertox kinda said, why isn't this money being put to use to actually fix the forum? If we actually saw some benefit from it then it'd be fine but right now it just seems like the news section is being used as an advertising platform.

Considering the forum gets at least 1 mil impressions daily and you have 2/3 banners on each page I fail to see how these costs are not covered already, unless you're getting massively ripped off over your server.

**djpenny** · 12-31-2012

i don't even read the home page anyways lol so i don't care whats get put up

**KyleOnTheRun** · 12-31-2012

Originally Posted by Blacksite

I have a feeling that the sponsored posts, which are said to expire the next day, will get more comments than some of the other news articles. =P

But thanks for letting us know.

Judging by the latest, it seems you're absolutely correct.

**StevenW** · 12-31-2012

They aren't high paying ads on the community pages, though we're working in 2013 to amend that. There's a list of site-wide issues that we deal with one at a time and we fixed lots of stuff in 2012 and spent money on things like Facebook integration.

We will bring all these forum issues up at our next meeting shortly and see what can be done to address them. I'll let you know what the outcome is in the next couple of weeks.

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