Hobby website advertising on Improbable Island

Improbable Island provides free banner advertising on the New Game Day page (which players generally see maybe a couple times a day) to hobby websites and sole traders. Here's a sample of how it gets rendered, and you can click the link below the ad for an explainer on why I'm doing this.

This is a free advert for a random Improbable Island fan's hobby website. Improbable Island earns no money from this ad!
(Why the hell are you showing it to me then?)

No money changed hands to show you this banner ad. This ad is appearing because CMJ doesn't like how the internet has become five massive shit websites filled with screenshots of the other four massive shit websites. For the internet to become the internet again, we've gotta get eyeballs on smaller websites, with links to other websites, so people can surf the net again (remember that?), and Improbable Island is big enough to help out with that.

This is the only page on Improbable Island where you'll ever see an ad, and the ad you see here is chosen at random from a large pool of people who've asked for their ad to be shown here. Corporations aren't allowed to advertise here, so this ad is probably to a weird niche personal hobby website that might send you down a cool rabbithole to who-knows-where. If you're even remotely curious about the ad you see above, I encourage you to click it now (it opens in a new tab) rather than assuming it'll come around again, because you might be waiting a while!

If you have a hobby website, fan site, independent blog, webcomic, site for your writing or music or knitting patterns or woodworking projects or whatever, visit this page with your 468x60 banner image and the URL you want me to link to, and I'll put it in the deck to be shuffled and shown here at random. No money, no catch, no bullshit, just help us reclaim the weird niche hobby internet that big business stole from us.

We're giving away free advertising because the likes of Amazon and Google and Facebook really really hate it when people give away the thing they're trying to sell, and they've never done a damn thing for us. Fuck 'em. Take back the Net.

Thanks for helping us keep the internet weird! You'll need a 468x60 non-animated safe-for-work banner image in .jpg or .png format. If you need some inspiration, or you just want to see a bunch of cool personal websites, here's a page of all the ads we're running right now.

Ad rules

• Random; Ads are shown at random on the New Day page. Small sites and big sites get the same treatment here.
• Might not be random one day; In future we may give priority to websites based on things like having a well-populated "links" page (that is, cool hobby websites that link to other cool hobby websites) or being an independent website on your own domain, not providing content for some big business wankers, IE davesCoolGerbilWebsite.com rather than corporateGerbilWebsite.com/thanksForTheFreeContentDave/. I mean hell, you either got here from the Improbable Island New Day page or from somewhere on fedi, you know what a good website is. We're not gonna mess with priorities now but if we do in the future I'll email you to let you know.
• Sites have to not suck; No spam, no scams (mlm/cryptocurrency/nft are scams), no racists, no homophobes, no terfs, no corporations, no fash shit, and no stuff that the Improbable Island player base won't like (don't worry though they're super chill).
• Weird is good; Sites we advertise don't have to be general-audience, niche is great. If your site is three hundred pages on historical methods of goat-rearing from 1366-1570 in SouthWestern UK outside of Cornwall because they had their own whole thing then that's fantastic.
• Commercial OK; If your site is for selling things, that's fine, get that money, so long as the thing you're selling is the result of some kind of artistic/creative endeavour and you're a sole trader or a partnership - if you're just a marketing or copywriting dude, or you're big enough to have employees, look elsewhere. Some co-operatives are OK too, submit your ad, worst I can say is no.
• NSFW OKish; Sites have to be SFW or have their NSFW bits clearly delineated (for example art sites with a seperate and clearly-marked NSFW page are fine, art sites with butts right there on the landing page don't qualify). Improbable Island "officially" doesn't have a problem with NSFW so long as the people who see it consented to seeing it (here's our code of conduct - you don't need to read it if you just want to run an ad, but it lays out how we approach NSFW if it's relevant to you).
• It has to work; If your site won't load in Firefox with enhanced tracking protection and ublock origin, or my CPU fan starts spinning, you'll have to sort that out before I'll approve it.
• No popups; that includes cookie warnings and privacy notices. If your site's so bogged down with tracking scripts that the law requires you to warn your visitors about it, take out the spyware or advertise elsewhere.
• This is a free public service; You have no obligation towards Improbable Island, I have no expectation of you, you get advertising for free, that's it. You can link back to Improbable Island if you want, or not. You can tell all your website-owning friends about this program, or not. I'd like it if you did, but that's all, please do not feel obliged.
• I need your email address, for two reasons. First, you might have to move your site to a different URL, or make a better banner, and you'll want to tell me about that, and I need a way to know it's you. Second, folk on Fedi have been asking, and one day we might expand this program into a "proper" old-school independent hobby site banner exchange, hosted on another site made for that purpose rather than this rickety fifteen-year-old game website. Consenting to us showing your ad here does not imply consent for anything else, so if that day ever comes, you'll get an email laying it all out and asking whether you're interested in joining, on an explicitly opt-in, active-consent basis. If you say "Yes please" then we'll have some 1999-style Internet Fun; if you say "No thanks," or don't reply, then nothing will change and we'll carry on showing your ad here like usual.

Ad upload form