Selling our Soul (in the Best Possible Way)

Building sites that both support and derive value from a community is one of our great memes at the moment, and one we have fully embraced when building Bouldr. One of the biggest problems, however, is how to break even; servers, bandwidth and development all cost money, and someone has to pay.

Thanks to the legions of advertising networks that have grown out of this rich demand for an easy monetisation method, there are plenty of opportunities to quickly and cheaply monetise a site (so long as you don't end up unintentionally breaking it, that is!).

It is important to note that we have been very concious with Bouldr that it should never contain anything that is of no use or consiquence to our users - banner advertisements make any UI look tarnished, and ad networks can often end up showing adverts that are not relevant to the user.

Bouldr serves climbers from around the world - we are a niche service, and we would like to keep it free for our users. Our niche is so well defined that we decided that a better way to organise the monetisation side of things was not to use a separate advertising publisher service, but to develop our own. In this way, we are able to moderate the advertisers we accept in order to prevent our users seeing irrelevant ads, and we can integrate them into our site in as many varied ways as we like.

Bouldr's Advertising network is not ready just yet, but we are well on the way, and hope to be launching soon.