Good Ads and Bad Ads
So you've got a popular (or maybe semi-popular) website and you want to get a little money off of it. The best solution, of course, it an ad on the site. What kinds of ads should you get? In my opinion, these are two types of good ads:
But what about the bad ads? In my opinion:
There are a lot of honest users out there who want to make some money for their time. I deeply understand that (hey, I have a text ad on this blog). I'll even click on them if I enjoy the content that is on the site. But when the ads start to get annoying and draw me away from the content, that's where I draw the line. I come to a website to look at the content, not be bombarded by pop-ups and flash ads. I don't feel guilty blocking those, but I do feel guilty blocking the un-annoying ones.
I stopped using Adblock for awhile, but I re-installed it today. I'm trying to use it only to block bad ads, and I like what I've achieved so far.
To those of you who use Adblock as well: don't block out good ads! They're not annoying at all!
- Any sort of text ad (aka Google AdSense)
- Any type of ad that does not draw the user away from the site's content
But what about the bad ads? In my opinion:
- All kinds of pop-ups (especially the ones that exploit the FF problem)
- Flashy animated GIF ads (I deeply hate the flashy "You're an instant winner! Click here to claim your prize")
- Flash ads. Not only are they annoying, they sometimes create noise and cause older machines to slow down
- Any sort of ad that draws the user away from the site's content
- Any ad that gets annoying to look at
There are a lot of honest users out there who want to make some money for their time. I deeply understand that (hey, I have a text ad on this blog). I'll even click on them if I enjoy the content that is on the site. But when the ads start to get annoying and draw me away from the content, that's where I draw the line. I come to a website to look at the content, not be bombarded by pop-ups and flash ads. I don't feel guilty blocking those, but I do feel guilty blocking the un-annoying ones.
I stopped using Adblock for awhile, but I re-installed it today. I'm trying to use it only to block bad ads, and I like what I've achieved so far.
To those of you who use Adblock as well: don't block out good ads! They're not annoying at all!
Written by Justin @ 11/26/2005 10:23:00 PM | Permalink
1 Comments:
At 11/27/2005 06:51:00 PM,
Jon said…
This is a good topic and dear to my heart. I run ads on my site to be sure, but I avoid certain ones.
About once a week I go into Burst Media to configure my ads. Each week there's a new batch of ads offered that I get to pick from.
In general, I pick any ad that isn't a popup or popunder and that isn't distasteful. That's my starting criteria and sometimes I hone it down even further from there. It's not always possible to see exactly what ads are going to show on your site (in general you get a company name, a campaign name, and *some* of the media that's going to show, but not always all of it).
The tough part is that money. Other than the Chitika ads on my site, everything else are CPM ads. This means that I get paid for impressions, and not for clicks. It's generally a little harder to get into CPM programs and the payouts are a little less than PPC (pay-per-click like AdSense), but the income is consistent as long as your traffic is consistent.
Back to the money: I've discovered why there are so many popups and popunders on the Internet. The banners that are shown on my site are around the $2-$5 per thousand impressions. That's pretty standard. Popups and popunders routinely pay over $10 and some closer to $20 per thousand impressions. That's a HUGE difference.
I've never allowed popups and popunders to show on my site, but there are some days when the little devil-jon on my shoulder is telling me to run them...just for day or two. I never have and to be honest, I don't think I ever will on my site. I hate popups and popunders and regardless of the money I wouldn't want to subject my readers to that.
At least I can now understand why there are so many popups and popumders out there.
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