Impact on users of sites with ads

The last post about sites that have very annoying features mentioned excessive ads as one of them. Ads take up such a large real estate on the world wide web, has such an impact on users and owners (financially in that case if it works well!), that it deserves a more in-depth discussion here. After all, there are so many resources and information out there for site owners who want to place ads on their site yet so little discussion about visitors who view these ads and make site owners money. These visitors are very much in the majority. It’s time to give them a voice.

How excessive advertising is wrong

Plastering ads between paragraphs of text is a very deceptive practice which serves to confuse readers as it is not always easy to differentiate at first glance what is ad and what is not. Many publishers are guilty of this as they strive to get as many visitors as possible to click by mistake on their adsense contextual ads, earning them a quick and easy buck in return. 

About.com is one of them. To be honest, I found some of the in-depth articles from about.com to be very useful; however, it was quite off-putting to read, having to navigate through ads all over the place. Certainly not a good user experience.

On some sites, anyone can write and publish content whilst the site owners make big money with their MFA (Made for Adsense) sites, web 2.0 version.

Whilst I enjoy sites like Squidoo (such as this article on men’s shirts and ecommerce) and Hubpages, they also place ads all over their pages in a bid to squeeze as much advertising juice out of the pages. On Squidoo, you can find infolinks, contextual image ads, a banner ad at the top and Adsense. And guess what? The pages are created by users, people like you and me. In google’s Terms of Service (TOS), only up to 3 blocks may be displayed on a page in order to keep a balance between content and ads and yet Squidoo displays 4 blocks of Google Adsense ads. Do they have a special agreement with the big G so that the latter can earn even more?

However, to be fair to Squidoo, they do share their advertising revenue with their content creators and charities. In fact, some writers are supposed to be making a decent amount of money publishing content on Squidoo. And Squidoo does have to pay for the cost of hosting and its development team. It also gives you the ability to opt out of the infolinks and contextual image ad. The adsense within the body text and on the sides look very spammy for such a popular site.

Hubpages allows you to place your adsense code on the page that you have created on their site and rotates your ad with theirs so that yours appear 60% of the time, earning you a 60% revenue share on average.

Infolinks

A quick word about infolinks since I’ve mentioned them several times already. These are links that pop up a small ad window when your cursor hovers aver them. Many visitors can be tricked into thinking it is a link in relation to an article but no, it displays an annoying and irritating pop-up window that slows down your browser and gets in your way by hiding the text you are reading. They are among the most irritating ads as they are not static.

All this doesn’t mean a site should have no ads. As explained for Squidoo, sites should be able to cover their costs and make some profit. How do you combine ads with content to please both readers and publishers? We look at this in the next installment.