As you may or may not be aware, we have been adding more and more advertisements to our pages over the last couple years. This was an effort to offset the declining ad revenue we have been receiving during this period. Over the last two years we have seen our overall number of daily impressions go up and our ad revenue go down. This is very important to note because this means our expenses have gone up, but our income has gone down. We worked very hard to overcome this by adding more pop-up ads, more intrusive forms of advertising like takeover ads, flash ads and so forth.

Even with these additional advertisements, our ad revenue is no longer enough to cover our hosting fees. Let me reiterate the importance of that statement. Advertising alone no longer covers our monthly hosting expenses which cost us thousands of dollars a month. The irony of growing expenses and declining revenue should not be lost here. I’d laugh if it were not so serious for this network. We have done everything in our power, and I do mean everything – we’ve sacrificed quite a bit - to keep this network online.

We have worked hard to provide a valuable service to the MMOG community by providing as much information and services as we can for each title we cover. By offering community forums, news and information, guides and reviews, developer chats and interviews and so much more we’ve strived to become a complete online resource. We hope that you’ve come to count on Stratics as a source for information about your favorite MMOG title.

We tried hard to avoid exactly what I am doing here with this message to you; asking you for help. But really, it has come to just that. We need our visitors to help us stay online. Yes, it is that serious. We have done the best that we could to keep the Stratics Network online without any cost to our visitors, but we just cannot achieve that end through advertising alone anymore. The trend we’ve seen over the last year or so has been sites like ours asking for donations or offering membership services. It seems we now must move in that direction as well.

In order to try and help offset this declining advertising market, we’ve launched a new service called Stratics Plus. In partnership with Flashlink, we can now offer an ad-free Stratics, as well as promising future enhancements for our Plus (and, as always, non-plus) customers. Beyond that, a Stratics Plus membership helps to pay for our hosting support, and the Flashlink membership provides you with access to a number of other sites that have had to move in this direction.

We believe we offer a valuable service to the MMOG community and we hope you feel the same way. Help us to continue to provide these services by joining the Stratics Plus program. I must admit, it is pretty cool to browse the network completely ad free! We do understand that many people have their own pop-up and ad blockers (which ironically might have helped the decline in ad revenue), but Flashlink gives you much more. You also gain some great new perks in the forums. Like the ability to edit your own title, the ability to post polls, special search functions, access to a special smiley icon library of over 55 icons and much, much more. We’ve also added a new EverQuest Database that includes over 11,600+ detailed items and three new modules are in development. They will be added over the next few weeks (one module a week). These include a reference material on spells, quests and factions. A new DAoC database is also going to be released in the very near future! We really want to show our appreciation to those who help us by providing as many tools, features and services as we can. Be sure to watch for announcements as each new item is released.

Your help is greatly appreciated and we hope that with this new service we can not only to continue to provide great content and services to you, but we hope it grows enough to allow for us to expand our services even further. So please, consider helping Stratics by becoming a Stratics Plus member today. We appreciate the contributions that so many have made in the past and we really did not want to have to ever ask for a financial contribution from anyone. We have done our best to find other ways to keep the network financially viable; we're just running low on options at this time. For now any help, even the smallest commitment you feel able to make really can make a difference. Please help us so that we can continue offering you the services you’ve come to expect from Stratics.

Warm regards,

Ryan ~Den Dragon~ Findley
Founder

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