It is hard to believe that ModDB is 13 years old and IndieDB is nudging 7 years. We are as strong today as we have ever been serving up 35 million pages to our 4 million monthly users. It is a massive labour of love for us, helping so many mods and indie games on their way to success.
We want to keep doing this for a long time, and provide the best community on the web for developers to share what they are working on, whenever and however they want. We succeed when we help you reach a large audience, we have big plans and look forward to putting them into motion over the coming months and years.
Today marks an important day for us, as we welcome our new media representative Gamer Network. Gamer Network specialise in marketing for all games (especially those in the PC and indie space) where we find ourselves strongly positioned. They run Eurogamer, EGX and work with our friends over at Rock Paper Shotgun. We hope this partnership will allow us to display relevant and most importantly friendly ads - and reverse the trend towards adblock.
Let us know what you think, we believe that mods and indie games are only going to become more and more important, and by working with a company that understands their importance - it'll help us secure our financial future, remain independent and provide a better service all in one go.
MODDB community goes strong and I hope that the strength will be with us all the time. I started my as modder's carrier here, on MODDB about 6 years ago and right now I become freelancer level designer ;)
Been great to have you along for the ride. Here is to another 6 years!
So very happy to have some part in kicking this off (we're publishing The Red Solstice, which may be somewhat visible on the site right now). Can't wait to see what this brings to moddb and indiedb!!
Awesome, just purchased your game actually - pleased to see the strong reviews!
So what will this actually mean for day to day stuff?
What kind of partnership is it, mutual promotion, marketing strategies?
Marketing strategies mostly. But more cross promotion with their network of sites RPS, Eurogamer, VG247. Basically it allows us to focus on improving and growing the community while they seek good relevant advertising partners
The MODs are strong in this community^^
I've never been so proud to be part of any such community :D for me this experience is always getting even more interesting over the years.
Whatever you feel is good for the community, I'm totally for it!
It's amazing to see that the staff are actually taking real steps to tackle the ads issue (which, with all honesty, I've never really encountered at all). Thumbs up for your hard work :)
Oh and right now I can see an ad for some COOP game on Steam in a square on the right hand side. So yeah it seems to be working! More games ads on a website for mods and games! Makes sense XD
Adblock is a major challenge, we've been asking people to turn it off and support us for a while, but it is hard to backup that statement when your ads are loud, slow and not relevant. This change allows us to solve all of those issues and hopefully justify the whitelisting.
Thanks for your support!
May the force be with ModDB :D
RPS and Eurogamer are **** publications though. Dunno bout EGX, I don't recognize the site. If anything this worries me honestly.
I've always been a fan - but can understand that they don't cater to all tastes.
Its not a matter of 'fan'. John Walker specifically is a liar and all around douchebag. The sheer bias put forth story wise is absurd.
they need to show various games in their ads, not just one game all the time. I browsed some pages on moddb just now and on every page I see THE RED SOLTICE!! it's everywhere. Might be good to show some other games too if I already clicked Red soltice
Well we should be delivering much more relevant game related advertising now, so I'm sure with time we will help many games with promotion
I never had the patience to deal with those stupid and intrusive ads that all sites have, so I always kept Adblock on. When you guys added that subscription thingy I decided I would subscribe as soon as I could. (Didn't happen yet. :/) But since it seems ads will be better now, I'll take a look at it the following days. :)
My opinion on RPS has gone from good to bad since Gamergate (not because of the corruption allegation on gaming media, but the way they handled the situation, evading simple questions in a Q&A, and a few other things I don't even care to remember right now), but since it seems this is just an ad partnership with their parent company, I hope everything goes right.
To many years ahead, ModDB! Remain independent, get stronger.
We shall remain independent and are working to get stronger :D
I wouldn't rely too heavily on ads to support the site though, that model of advertising has been in decline for a good while now.
Premium memberships are an option like Nexus.
I'm partial to my own idea of a point system like Deviantart for tipping and supporting developers and allowing indie developers to sell through Indiedb with Moddb taking a reasonable cut of the pie, this would have worked better if Desura was still around though.
It is a major challenge I must admit. We do have a small subscription system: Moddb.com but we'd need thousands of subscribers to pay for the 15 servers we have running this place.
Personally I'd like to be able to offer an awesome service and sell content instead of running ads, so we will explore what we can do that makes sense.
IBM does good ads, as example, but ads that blink, make sounds or distract in general from the actual site content are annoying. As well as the ads that are in extreme contrast to the site (blank white on a dark website really hurts), really horrible are the adds that autoplay, and everything starts moving, so that your eyes louse the focus on the site. (I suppose everyone knows these videos that cover the entire site background and start to autoplay, most of them can't even be paused).
There are decent good adds that get your attention without being annoying, these ads are okay, but most of the ads are really bad, and many ads link you to websites with bloat- and malware.
So you can not blame the users that want to protect them self, blame the ad department for allowing such ads, grabbing someones attention does not always mean that it is a good thing, especially if it is out of context annoying, repetitive and distracts the user from her/his actual planed task.
I agree, relevant advertising that displays games I believe can be great. But not when it interferes with the browsing experience. We've had a lot of trouble striking a balance in the past, which is why we believe Gamer Network will make a massive difference. They focus on game based ads, are indie and PC friendly, and always attempt to traffic acceptable ads.
Not sure ... I have had no problem supporting IndieDB to explicitly keep my Addblock running.
I don't watch TV or listen to the radio. The only advertisement I have to accept is in the paper (Wall Street Journal).
All I am doing is creating assets for my (our) game. Those assets I (we) am creating is expensive. The software and hardware alone go into the thousands of dollars. So if you guys need more cash for the site, no problem, but adblock will stay.
Sorry, you are still overdoing it on the front page. It is pretty unbearable.
Too many ads?
Ads are so annoying when I downloading some mods. I dont use Adblock, it doesn't work properly.
@ Milanium - Then feel free to delete my post.
To be quite honest I thought ModDB was eithen older then that lol.
Hi
I am probably disturbing a resting article but I see comments from last year , so I hope i'm not too late to say something here too
I don't mind ads at all , some of them I even like . I never used ad blocker but I'm confused by the fact that some browsers like Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 shows me regional ads with stuff from perfume shops , second hand cars sales and other unrelated stuff right when i'm here .
Shouldn't I be able to see only MOD DB related ads ?
It saddnens me to hear that you good fellows hold your servers out of your own pockets
I thought you are well off with finances and you earn a lot from this business ..though I have little knowledge about internet businesses
Maybe premium membership would not be so bad but for that to happen MOD DB needs to hold much more mods than it does already because the Nexus is chock full of mods unlike here where some mods cannot be found here or mod categories like adult mods for example
Finances in my life are not a strong point right now but I would contribute in this way without hesitation , most certainly will do it one day
Where I really hate ads are on Youtube that pump out in the middle of a video i watch even a song i'm listening having a 5 second counter . Those ads are annoying and would wanna see them go , not in any case ads of MOD DB
My best wishes with this