Mg. Avaris Clari

I can give you a bit of perspective of how I used it if it helps. I feel like this would be a common pattern.

On the first two days, I actively looked at the AA, seeing a lot of cool stuff, being happy that so many supported the site and got their work out there in an "accessible" way. $10 for a week of ads? Everyone wins in this situation... But that comes with the caveat that everyone wins. You're suddenly competing for interest with everything in the AA, when before, it was organically coming up in relevant feeds.

However, the fact that AA is in the sidebar, and, well, IS an ad platform... I haven't really gone back to it. I can't bother to check for new listings constantly in the event that something new catches my eye, when most of the ads I had seen on there I had already seen when I had gone back previously.

The AA is an awesome idea, but... Maybe it needs to be more at the front of a user's mind to check. Perhaps a more forward facing AA is what the site needs?

Maybe something like the discovery queue on Steam would work for this.

i signed up on the first day and got a meaningful spike in views and purchases, riding on a combination of the newness of the feature and presumably plain luck. in raw numbers, i didn't quite make back what i spent, getting 29 visits that led to 5 sales totaling $17 in two weeks, but i was definitely not expecting to make the investment back, that's not even the point

i was happy with what i got out of it, though i haven't been back to artist alley in a week or so, partially because when i visit it i see largely the same listings as before

extremely hard to tell how well my ad did, since bandcamp Friday also made it sensible for people to wait until then and then buy directly, but i did see a lot of visits from cohost to our page, so my gut feeling is that it did its job

however i think an ad longer than a week makes no sense. after a week the visits from cohost dried up almost completely. (for the record i don't regret spending $40 for the sake of the website, but i think it would be just as effective to do 1 week, and much more effective to do 4 different ads for 1 week each).

i agree a random ad should be served to the main page (under cohost corner seems fine to me), that would make longer-running ads more sensible to me...

this post reminded me to go back to the AA and I ended up buying a few things as a result. I think we can as a community maybe encourage each other to do this which might help.. I am definitely on team "it's OK to show us some of these on the regular dashboard even if its on its own little area"

it ended up being totally worth it to me, though i can echo other people's observation that you only really see returns on an ad for the first few days or so. my intention is to come back and buy a week once a month, for that reason!

though that being said, what i was advertising was free: i was looking for people to add my game to their steam wishlist. when i say it was "worth it," i'm using the industry assumption that about 10% of your wishlisters will buy the game. i do wonder if artist alley wishlist adds will be more or less than that?

I think chost should allow people to opt in to having artist alley appear on your feed, and perhaps make it default to show one or two at the bottom of the page. Tbh, I checked it once or twice, but it's hard for one thing to grab my attention when I'm shown dozens at the same time

I got 4 weeks for an album (Nestos Me Toi), that's currently still ongoing (only a few days in). I've gotten a spike of listens, no purchases. I went in vaguelly expecting to not get any purchases, since Nestos Me Toi is the kind of album with an extremely small niche of people who actually like that kind of stuff, and my label keeps putting the album on free album code lists without asking me first so I expect everyone who wants it has already grabbed it for free, or knows they can grab it for free.

Notably, though, I got my first clear sign of someone listening to the entire album all the way through from the store page. While I can see the album has been grabbed by a LOT of people with free album codes, nobody's actually listened to the whole thing from the store page or the official album stream yet; kind of a nice bit of validation I guess.

I'm more glad to have been able to give ASC a handful of cash for something that I actually want. None of the features in cohost plus are things that I personally want (something you'll always have to deal with running that kind of subscription) and it's easier for me to occasionally drop $55 CAD than it is to add another monthly fee over $5 CAD. I hope AA works out, but it does look like ASC will have to be a bit more proactive with making long-term ads worth it, like having an optional AA box somewhere on the main feed screen as suggested by others, or something like having a section at the top of the AA screen for listings from pages that you're following.

this post is how i learned it was a feature, thanks for that

I got a spike of follows, one purchase, I don't think I'd use it again. I was happy to support cohost though