Advertising

Advertising on THR connects you directly with our audience, at a low cost and brand-safe way, while respecting the privacy of our users. If you are ready to get started, make sure you are logged in to THR and click here. Create your ad. As soon as your ad is approved you will get an e-mail to let you know your invoice is ready. Your ad starts running immediately after payment.

We offer multiple advertising options depending on your goals:

Banner Advertising

Our primary advertising offering is display advertising via banners on the site.  Unlike some other sites, when you advertise with THR:

• Your ad reaches our real, unfiltered audience. 
• You reach our audience at the lowest cost by advertising directly with us.  With the third-party ad company eliminated, your ads get around more ad blockers as well.
• Each advertising dollar reaches 51 different people (on average) that we can track. In many cases your reach will be wider as our ad server gets around many ad blocking packages. 
• 53.3% of our visitors come from search engines; the rest are regulars.  This means every ad buy includes a solid mix of reach and repetition.
• You are advertising on the most actively moderated shooting forum on the Internet.  You can have confidence that your ad will not appear alongside objectionable material, which can be important with that silly "cancel culture" going around.

General Recommendations

• Choose a longer ad campaign over a shorter one.  If you're looking to spend $3,000 advertising here you will get a much better return on your investment by buying two ad slots for a 12 month term, even without the discount we build in for longer-term advertising.  The more someone sees your ads, the more faith they are going to have that you are a legitimate company, and the more likely they are to have your company come to mind when they are ready to make their next purchase.  Six months is better than 2, and 12 months is better than 6.  (When national brands reach out about test ad campaigns here on THR, they are asking about 12-18 month terms for the test because shorter terms aren't valid.  Advertising takes time to have a real effect from a branding perspective.)
• Upload multiple ads per ad slot.  Some ads get a better response than others, and the "best" ads are often those that aren't as well polished.  Over time, ads that have been seen a lot will begin to underperform and other ads will do better.  We allow you to upload multiple ads per ad slot - go ahead and do so, and use the clickthrough rates you see to guide which ads stay, and what new ads should look like should you choose to create more.
• Upload a banner rather than using inserting a banner code.  Advertising is a plague on the Internet, and has become so annoying that popular browsers often block ads by default.  A call from THR's page to your server that returns an ad is much more likely to be blocked automatically than an image coming from THR itself.

Buying Ads

The process is reasonably straightforward: log in to your user account, click "Advertising" on the top header row, choose "create ad" on the left-hand side, and fill in the details.  We manually approve the ads, and once you're approved an invoice will be sent, and the ads will display as soon as the invoice is paid.  We offer discounts for 6- and 12-month terms which are automatically applied.

Which Ad Slot Should I Choose?

It doesn't matter.  Some ad slots perform better than others, but we track performance and run the math in the background to make sure they all perform comparably.   We've done the math to insure that the return on investment of your advertising dollar is comparable for each shot.  Just grab one that's available in a size you like, and go from there.

I Want a Campaign Larger than $125 per Month

We offer five different ad packages, so go ahead and choose ad slots from multiple packages.   If your needs are greater than that then send an e-mail to [email protected] and we can talk about custom options, like sponsoring a particular area of the site and co-branding it. THR is open to innovative marketinging strategies