What level of flexibility is there with ad islands?

For example, in the same forum can you randomly or alternatively serve Google and Yahoo contextual ads?

At this point, it's basically a "one ad" system, there isn't anything that would allow cycling, though that could be an intereting feature...

The unit itself does support PHP, so you could build some sort of functionality...

Thanks.

Gizmo summed it up pretty well. You could easily do some sort of random function to serve up an ad or you could go more complex.

Since the ad island is just a custom island it can actually be any type of island not just an ad. Once things get going I'm sure there will be a lot of different type of custom islands posted over on the dev site for download.

IMHO, the best solution would be to use a third party ad manager such as PHPAdsNew to handle all your ad rotating and insertion. You'd just copy PHPAdsNew's inclusion script into UBB's Content Islands.

PHPAdsNew is a very robust, professional grade, ad manager and adds many features such as allowing you to easily update an ad's code across multiple sites, changing which ads are displayed and when. e.g. have some ads appear only at certain days and/or times, to certain IP ranges (US visitors only), only show an ad to a user x many times in x many minutes, etc. Best of all its free.

PHPAdsNew can also be quite confusing

Thanks for the tip. Reason I ask is that you can't server Google and Yahoo ads on the same page. Being able to rotate them would be great.

Mitch, curiosity, how well have you done on yahoo ads vs google?

Yahoo payout percentage is better than Google (at least for me).

I've heard others say they've done better with Google.

Have you tried either?

I use Google, I get horrid results :/... They told me i would be getting MUCH MUCH more than what I make off with... As is, i'm lucky for $100/mo (and at times, $150+ every 2 months)