Most pages on Informed Consent have a banner advertisement near the top. There's one on this page, and each time you look at a page the IC system chooses one of the current banners at random. The content of the page doesn't influence the system's choice of banner.
We use some of the banner slots to publicise BDSM community causes and campaigns (like The Spanner Trust.) Occasionally we also include banners for semi-commercial events which are suffering some form of anti-BDSM prejudice or discrimination. The remaining banner slots (usually marked with "This page sponsored by ...") are used to cover some of the hardware and bandwidth costs associated with operating IC as a free resource for its users. We also receive some support via anonymous donations from individuals, but the banner advertising remains our principal way of dealing with our rising costs.
IC now has a self-service banner advertising system, and you can access this system through a normal IC profile. It allows you to upload banners, pay money into your banners account and choose how much to spend each day. When people click on your banner, they are taken to your website (or your IC profile page if you prefer.) We accept the main credit and debit card networks, including MasterCard and VISA.
This feature is available to BDSM/Fetish events, venues, retailers and services but not to websites, BDSM-for-money services, or premium phonelines. All banners are manually checked before going live. You can increase or decrease the display rate at any time, and this can be used to target your banners to the period before a club night or product launch.
The system randomly selects which banner to display each time a page is viewed. Your account will be charged for each banner, up to the daily maximum you choose. Once everyone's daily maximum is reached, the remaining banner slots are shared out at no charge, in proportion to the amount spent that day.
Our rate for the paying slots is £1 per 5000 banner displays. For most online BDSM or fetish fashion shops, we would recommend a maximum of between £2 and £10 per day. (If there were no free slots, that would correspond to about 300,000 - 1,500,000 banner slots a month. However, your daily rate also determines what share you get of several million free slots distributed amongst all advertisers each month.)
Banners need to be 468x60 and less than 60kB in size, and can be in GIF, JPEG or PNG format. We cannot display banners involving genital nudity. If banners are animated, their transitions should be no more frequent than every 2 seconds.
Banners can be uploaded by signing-in and visiting the Manage Banners section of the Your Settings area of the site.
Please email sales@informedconsent.co.uk if you have any questions about sponsoring pages on IC.
