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Though the announcement posts have since been lost, we also donated $2,907 to Gawad Kalinga and $3,908 to Ettie Lee Homes.

Again, that's a total of over $93,000 ($93,372.60 to be exact.) We still have enough time to break $100,000 by our 10th anniversary - but we'll need your help to get there.

Here are some additional updates regarding the End Dogfighting campaign I received today:

Recent News - Chicago

Michael Vick tells Chicago youth dogfighting is a dead end street: Watch our video.

Jeff's Pit Bull Training Team Journal: Read how some of Chicago's toughest men and dogs turn their lives around.

Slideshow of Our Pit Bull Training Team Stars: See the faces of End Dogfighting in Chicago's Austin and Englewood Pit Bull Training Teams.

Spotlight '10 - Save the Date - Chicagoans mark your calendars early for Spotlight Humane: Chicago 2010. This fabulous fundraiser for End Dogfighting in Chicago will take place on February 27, 2010.

Recent News - Atlanta

Dog Days of Summer: End Dogfighting in Atlanta's community event inspired and educated local pit bull owners on how to keep their dogs cool and happy in Atlanta's heat.

Amber's Pit Bull Training Team Journal: We're going on our second PBTT session. Watch us grow!

Spotlight Humane: Atlanta: Get your tickets for our October 17^th event while their hot! Atlanta's first annual gala will benefit the End Dogfighting in Atlanta campaign. Special guests include Hal Sparks, Wayne Pacelle, and Victoria Stillwell of Animal Planet's It's Me or the Dog.

*Like what you see? Help us help dogs and kids by donating to the End Dogfighting campaign. Every dollar counts!

I thought our funds was on its way to the 100k mark? Or did you mean cumulative?

I know that revenue is collected through ads, and I have never had a problem with the ads until recently. Through NT's ads, my computer got infected with some very annoying malware, and I resorted to using an ad blocker. I don't know if the problems with ads has been addressed yet, but I've seen recent complaints in the General forum. I want to get back to helping NT donate to charity, but I can't take off the adblocker until I'm 100 percent sure that this problem has been addressed. I'm sure you all have done all you can to address this issue, but I'm sure others have resorted to using adblockers as well, and I think if we can regain confidence in the ads, we will be able to increase revenue. I would say PM me your response, but I'm sure that there are many others who feel the same way I do, and they need to read the response as well.

I could sit here and craft a very diplomatic statement out of respect for our partners at Kickapps, who are responsible for our advertising at the moment, but you should know by now that I keep it 100. We're not satisfied with the current advertising situation and I can't imagine the people at Kickapps are either. Ideally we'd have better optimized advertising that's more secure, better targeted, and higher yield - so we could raise more money for wonderful causes like the End Dogfighting program.

It boils down to an efficiency issue and, since people are curious, I'll explain how our advertising works and where the problem comes from.

Static online advertising (text based ads, still images, etc.) tends to be easily ignored. As Internet users become more experienced, their ability to visually differentiate between content and advertising reaches the point where one could literally put "click here and we'll send you $20," in an ad unit, leave it up for a solid week, and be out no more than $100. Place that same message within a post and you'd be running up a deficit faster than George W. At present, we're dealing with clickthrough rates so minuscule they'd be considered statistically insignificant in most applications. Advertisers seek to generate clicks - that's the whole point. They want to attract your attention and lead you to their website. Where conventional advertising has failed, marketers attempt to up the ante with multimedia ads and as the units become more complex the opportunities increase for unscrupulous or downright malicious individuals to exploit security vulnerabilities to force automatic redirects (which attempt to fraudulently manufacture clicks and therefore make far more money than the ad costs) or even embed malware on users' machines.

Now, why can't we just cancel that one bad ad? That leads us to the heart of the matter. Unless you individually book every ad that appears on your website, you'll need to rely on one or more ad networks. Ideally, adsense and other networks would responsibly screen EVERY single ad they accept 1) for any harmful or intrusive scripts 2) for legal violations (e.g. counterfeit merchandise, copyright violations, etc.) Where their screening methods fail, we have to track down the ad ourselves. This is a complicated process, especially given that ads are often contextually generated based not only on the post you're viewing but, often, based on your recent browsing habits. In the past, it's boiled down to isolating the ad network responsible for serving the offending ad and then simply pulling the whole network from our rotation. That negatively impacts our bottom line in the short term, yet it's worth it to us not only because your experience is at the heart of everything we do (we started NikeTalk with the singular goal of creating the best possible online community for our fellow sneaker fans), but because we can't allow intrusive, offensive, or exploitative advertising to cause our users to block our ads entirely. Advertising isn't just how we finance our donations - they're the reason we're still online. While we can volunteer our time to manage the community, which represents a service that many companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for each year, hosting costs a tremendous amount of money and that's not something we can do ourselves. We need to pay those bills somehow.

As far as I'm aware, currently there are NO ads being served in our rotation that have launched any malware scripts, etc. We recently had an issue with multimedia ads playing audio by default, but I believe that's been resolved. The problem, of course, is that at the moment it's impossible to guarantee that the ad providers we utilize will NEVER allow a malicious ad to slip through. I wish I could, but it's not, at the moment, under our direct control. I have to trust AdSense and several other networks, and they operate largely on the basis of automation. Their screening is impressive given the volume of ads they serve, but it's imperfect.

There is an alternative, but it's a radical one. We'd need to move toward individually arranging every single ad that runs on this site. That requires the services of professionals. There are costs and benefits to this. The immediate benefit is that we'd have the ability to accept or deny all incoming ads - meaning we'd never have another ad for counterfeit merchandise appear on our site. We'd also be sure to deal only with trusted, reputable companies to minimize the possibility of any viruses etc. being transmitted through our ads. As if this weren't enough, individually arranged ads can also be far more lucrative than the types of ads we're running - it just takes far more work to arrange and implement these deals and, if they don't perform well, values can drop since we cater to a specific niche and our array of prospective sponsors is somewhat limited. If webstore X publishes an ad campaign through NikeTalk and it doesn't perform well or it experiences burnout over time (the more our users are exposed to an ad, the less likely it is to generate clicks), they're less likely to publish through us again. The greatest drawback here is that we'd be performing without a net. If the ads don't at least generate more than hosting costs, the site loses money - and given the way we've traditionally operated we have no stored assets to draw from as a buffer stock. We'd at the very least need to hang on to the online equivalent of two months' rent just to limit our exposure, which represents a short term loss of donations. Then you have to deal with the accounting issues we're currently shielded from with our existing partnership. NT would have to be incorporated at some level. We'd have to compensate the person or agency responsible for booking and implementing the ads. Odds are we might also have to change our forum platform - which would mean we'd lose all of our existing posts, user stats, etc. We'd be relaunching the site from scratch. It would be an enormous and risky undertaking, but the potential upside would be improved ad quality and increased charitable fund-raising capability.

So, that's the dilemma we're facing at present. Normally, this is the sort of thing that takes place "behind the curtains," but we consider NikeTalk a community and we try to include our fellow members in those decisions that affect us all. Collectively, everyone was behind us when we chose to implement advertising a means of keeping the site going, upgrading our forum platform, and raising money for charities. If we make a major change, it's something we'll do with you, not something we'll do to you.