The Armour Archive has become one of the more popular websites for people who research armour or participate in medieval re-enactment groups. On any given weekday, about 1400 people (unique computer addresses) connect to the Archive. These people download 110-120 thousand files in that average day -- 3/4 of a Gigabyte of information. Placing a link on this site will expose your company to a new customers who are interested in weaponry, armour, medieval-type wares, camping, and other outdoor related activities.

As an advertiser on the Armour Archive you have a couple of different avenues to present your web site.

• Links
  Probably the easiest, least expensive form of advertising you can get. It's free. We have three main categories of links on the Armour Archive: Armouries, Companies which supply equipment to armourers, and other Medieval Oriented Businesses. If your company falls into one of these categories you can request a link on the Armour Archive. For more information about this, click here.
  
• Banner Rotation
  Most any business may place a banner advertisement into the Archive's banner rotation program. For more information about banner advertising click the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
  
  

At this time, we are not accepting review items. This may change in the future.

The short answer is that you don't purchase one -- it's now free!
For a longer answer on how to get a link on the Archive that points people to your site, click here. (Sorry for what appears to be a run-around. We used to charge for links, so I didn't want to simply delete this section of the advertising faq. But I also didn't want to duplicate the information that's in the new, free, program for adding links.)

The banner rotation is open to any business who feels that the Archive is the right place to advertise their product (we reserve the right to reject your advertisement if we disagree). The banner rotation is a cgi-based program, set to display your banner a number of times before it expires. You purchase a certain number of exposures in the rotation. This may sound confusing if you are new to web advertising, so I will try to explain.

Web advertising is generally sold in increments of One Thousand Exposures. A high traffic site will usually sell increments of 1000 for between $20-$100 per 1000 exposures. If the Archive sold advertising at these rates, 100,000 exposures would cost roughly $2,000 - $10,000. However, I realize that most of the Armourer's and other Medieval oriented businesses out there cannot justify spending this amount of money on web based advertising. Therefore, in order to make it more affordable to smaller businesses, who need this kind of exposure to grow, I have decided to make advertising on the archive $1 per 1000 exposures.

We also base our advertising on a length of time. Our goal is to have enough advertisers, and enough traffic, that each ad gets about 500 exposures per day -- 15,000 per month. However, we can't guarantee that. If we don't have a lot of advertisers, your ad would show more often (and run out faster... that would be "bad"). If we have lots of advertisers, or not as much traffic as we estimate, your ad would get fewer exposures than we promised (which would also be "bad"). Because of this uncertainty, we will run your ad for the longer of the number of exposures, or the number of months (at 15,000 exposures per month). For the last several years, advertisements have lasted for the promised number of months -- we have had many more than 15,000 ad exposures per month, so the number-of-exposures limit has not been used.

Details:

1. The smallest number of units we sell is 6 months (90,000+ exposures). You can increase the number of exposures above that in increments of one month (15,000+ exposures).
2. If you purchase more than 6 months, I'll give you a 33% discount on the amount above that first 6 months. (I.e. the 1st through 6th months are $15/month, but the 7th and subsequent months are $10/month.)
3. If you are renewing an existing advertisement, and aren't changing anything other than the expiration date and/or banner image to use, then all the renewal costs are at the discounted $10/month.
4. If you want, you can run two or three ads at (about) one-half or one-third the frequency each, and combine their total exposures. If you do this, there is an additional $5 setup charge for each banner after the first.
5. If you have a reason for a special number of exposures or time length, I will try to accomodate it. I don't give any promise though.
6. The actual banner has to be 235 X 35 pixels, and must be a GIF or JPEG. It can be no more than 10k in file size. All banners are shown at the top of the Archive web pages, and rotate from page to page inside the site.

I'm trying a different method. The last thing you'll need to do is send the money. Before I take your money, I want to have the advertisement set up and approved by you. Send me an e-mail with the information that's needed to set up the link.

• Your actual name
• Your e-mail address (I don't want to have to search the headers for this)
• The URL that you want people to end up at when they click your link.
• A GIF or JPG image for people to click on (remember the file- and image- size requirements.)
• How long you want the banner-ad to run.

• If you like the advertisement, you can send the payment.
• If there are correctable problems, you can send them to me, and I'll do what I can to make the advertisement match what you want.
• If you don't like the way the advertisement looks, or if you change your mind and don't want it, you don't pay me (and I'll remove the ad).