Quit With the Clutter!
Along with my post about bloggers putting Adsense within posts I am also going to talk about ad cluttered blogs. I read a lot of blogs throughout the day, I currently read 151 RSS feeds and probably 95% of them are blogs. There is something that I have noticed through the years that I have been paying attention to the blogosphere, the amount of blogs that are cluttered with ads. I’m talking mostly about blogs that are relatively successful for the most part. When you have 10 or more ads on every single page of your blog that is a little rediculous.
I’m happy to say that I have never had a page on any of my blogs that have more then 3 ads. When I read blogs like Techcrunch I am fascinated by the fact that it has 13 ads on the homepage, 6 of which are above the fold. Now at least most of those are in the sidebar and there is only one banner ad but I think that because of how large Techcrunch is it would be able to get away with having a smaller amount of high paying ads instead of having a lot of lesser paying ads. Ads are ugly and they personally cause me to pay less attention to a blog. For some reason though I seem to think that others are under the impression that if you have a lot of ads you must be someone they can trust because advertisers trust you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t trust Techcrunch I’m just saying that Techcrunch shouldn’t have so many ads and small blogs with a lot of ads should be held up to higher scrutiny.
New bloggers, wait a little while before you put ads on your site. I don’t plan on putting ads on this site until I am around for 3 months or until I start seeing much higher numbers when it comes to page views. At that point I won’t put 5 banner ads on my blog, oh no no, I will most likely put one 468×60 unit at the top of post pages or between posts and comments. I want to keep it simple, keep it clean, and keep my readers happy.
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This is a GREAT tip! I waited for almost 6 months before placing my first ads and now I’m glad that I did.
As for ads cluttering sites, I suppose you could include mine in that category 8)
Part of optimizing income is through trying new and different things. Ad placement is one key to optimzing that income (if that is your goal).
To be honest, ads in posts don’t bother me at all if they are wrapped into the posts. Adds placed below the title that push the content down further I do not like.
The other thing to remember is that readers don’t click ads, search engine traffic does. Most readers will view the site through a feed so they shouldn’t even see the ads. There is a plugin I talked about a little bit ago that only places the ads after 10 days or whatever. I think this is an interesting idea and may be a solution for those of us that place ads in our posts to not offend regular readers.
Great post!
thats why they have more RSS readers.