Did you find this forum helpful?

derg

Apparently a "terse" writer
Staff member
Hey guys-

If these forums were helpful, please let your flight school know that ad space is available on the website.

I do, however, reserve the right to reject misleading advertisements (0 hours to airline captain in six months!) and will do so!
 
Doug,
These forums have answered more questions than the folks that sit at the desks of most of these flight schools. Thanks for providing such a helpful venue. I'd hate to see them go.
 
Without a doubt I've gotten more useful information about U.S. Flight Schools from this board than any other place on the net...period. Whats more, I will be attending a flight school soon, so I'm constantly scanning Jetcareers.com for new information from past and present students. I can't think of a better site for a flight school marketing dept to advertise their services.
 
Doug, where would this ad space go on your page if we are to push flight schools to pony up? The main page where you have "your ad here". Because I could imagine skipping right past ads (both visually and also in terms of usr interface) and go right to the boards. In other industries (minus porn pages), the web ad industry is in the tank.

Also (devils advocate here), if all of a sudden someone posted a question on the Garmin 430 and lots of people responded, will you be asking Garmin for ad contributions?

What if 20 posts say I should use the King videos for studying for the FAA Writtens... should King pay for ad space. Again, Devils advocate.

You mentioned filtering out the "0-captain in six months" example. In reality, there is a lot of grey and arbitrary claims made by flight schools all the time that arent so clearcut. How would you sift through this all if say FS Academy and Pan AM and ATP chose to advertise on your site?what if FS provides a nice ad and then there is some minor detail in the boards regarding, say, instrument time building in Vero versus Fargo... how would that be dealt with? What if you are a good school with some poor students who are vociferous on the board with their lack of success? How would you differentiate that from a mediocre school with good students who are disgusted. Your gonna have to have a plan for this if you start doing ad time from schools.

I totally understand the situation, web development and hosting ads not free... and for a lot of us, we use this board as a free resource.. Its free for us and not for you. I think that this situation is not a jetcareers problem but a problem of internet sites in general and actually its broader than that, its an "economics of information and technology" problem.

I like your site and have gotten a lot from it. If you want a donation, PM me and I we can discuss something. But I will say that if I believed there was a connection between which schools were allowed to have info posted and ad space, I would would probably not view the site as I do now.

If flight schools are paying ad space, then the first paragraph of the main page is gonna need some modification. You become a commercial source.
 
Hey Bluelake!

Well, it goes like this. I had an epiphany one day and realized that I'm truly giving the flight schools a valuable free service. I've probably gotten several megs of email from flight schools either thanking me for the publicity, or verbally berating me for the publicity.

Most of the letters I get are from schools that talked about how their enrollment picked up after some of these forums went up.

The forums eat up a lot of bandwidth on the server. So I was debating lumping all of the Flight Training forums into one generic forum until I decided to give the training schools an opportunity to directly reach the audience and help finance the costs of running the website.

Personally, there is a lot of 'salesmanship' on from marketers -- primarily the reason why I reserve all rights to tell a school to 'pack sand' if they practice what I personally feel is false advertising.

If an advertiser, just for arguments sake, offered me a $5,000 to run a misleading ad, I'd honestly tell them to kiss my butt (but in the vernacular).

Would I become a commercial source? Not in my eyes.

I'm not selling a product and whether or not I get two hits a day or 50,000, it makes me no difference as long as those two hits were from people that found answers to their questions. Seriously.

Also, I still reserve all rights to speak my mind, as it's my website and I answer only to myself. I don't have a board of directors to answer to and if a flight school, or advertiser screws up and tries to intentionally mislead my users, I'll promptly refund the balance of their advertising fee and 'let 'em have it'.

I think a lot of advertisers know this and thus haven't wanted to touch it with a 'ten foot poll'.

My integrity means worlds more than a few bucks I might get from running ads on the website. Believe me, after I toured and reported on my experience at Pan Am, tour offers flooded into my mailbox but that's not the kind of guy I am!

After all, it's a 30-day test to see if it's worthwhile to run aviation-related ads on the website.
 
Doug,

Thanks for the response. I know how expensive that web server s*** is... if you do the ad trials, atleast people who hop on will know that whomever is advertising is atleast an on-the-level company, cuz thats how people more less view this site I think.

I hope you didnt mind the "devils advocate" tosses.:):)

Thanks again for thehelpful site.
 
Look at www.studentpilot.net and www.studentpilot.com

Both websites have constant advertisements from various flight schools. Over the years the owners of those flight schools have jumped online to give their opinions and do a little marketing. Unfortunately, some 12 year old with a chip on his shoulder (or a bunch of them) flamed most of the long time participants, and the core community left.

Having the guys here with an itchy trigger finger on the "delete" key might bring some of them back to online posting.

Fly SAFE!
Jedi Nein
 
Hey Jedi-

Well it's far more important to me to please my users than it is to please an advertiser. Now if someone said, "XYZ flight school sucks crap, and here's why..." - I don't have a problem with that at all - even if they're a major sponser. It'll encourage the school to clean up.

But if someone says "XYZ eats babies and supports the Taliban", that's a little different! /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif

You know what's funny is that several times I've busted rival flight schools flaming other schools in the forum! it's pretty comical.
 
Doug,

Just visited your line of apparel and merchandise. Awesome, its like your the Michael Jordon of aspiring pilots.

Next paycheck, I will dig in for sure. Can I get 5% off for using my AOPA VIASA card /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif:):):)

Bluelake
 
If you can keep the quality as is, go for it. This site has been very helpful. I will be spending my money at ATP because of www.jetcareers.com. I just hope i will be able to give some thing back to this site in the months/years to come.
 
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