Advertising
From Fan History Wiki
There is a long history of advertising in fandom and it tends to fall in to several broad categories: Advertising by fans for fannish products, advertising by fans for commercial products, and advertising by third parties for products of interest to fans.
[edit] Advertising by fans for fannish products
Fans have advertised zines, conventions and a number of other things of interest in fan created publications and on the Internet for many years. These advertisements were done either free or to help cover costs of creating the publication/service for which the ad was placed in.
[edit] Advertising by fans for commercial products
Many fansites and conventions will advertise commercial products. One example of this is FictionAlley.Org:
- Fanfic sites like FictionAlley.org have been using google ads for years. Back in 2002, when WB's online store asked us to be an affiliate of their store, we asked them whether doing the same sort of affiliation with Amazon and other stores, and/or having small text ads on the site, would be thought of as commercial use, and they told us that they didn't consider it as such. Now, this is WB's legal department, specifically talking about fics, art, vids and essays rated R-or-less, and they have applied the same principle to other Harry Potter websites. And Mugglenet, who've worked with WB and also Scholastic, have pop-up ads as well as text ones on the fanfic portion of their site, for example, and they've talked about the six-figure-income they get from the site. FictionAlley's isn't anywhere near that - the site has never brought in more than a thousand dollars a year from the ads and affiliations, and we haven't had any GoogleAds since last summer since we had a Google Grant, and you can't do both. [1]
[edit] Advertising by third parties for products of interest to fans
There is a long history of companies trying to market to fans. FanLib advertised its service on Quizilla, trying to attract the fanbase on the site to FanLib.
