When Should New Blogs Display Ads?
TechZilo recently wrote an article talking about why new blogs should not display ads. Since I recently reached the one month mark I have thought about all the ways that I could put advertising on Blog Scrutiny without bothering the readers but I am not sure whether or not it is too early.
I haven’t had too much luck asking my readers things but I’m going to keep trying.
When is it time to put ads on a blog?
I believe that doesn’t have anything to do with the age of the blog but everything to do with how much traffic you get.
If I do decide to put ads on this blog they will not be adsense or any other PPC advertising (at least not yet) but will probably be affiliate links in one of the sidebars. Let me know what you all think in the comments and maybe I’ll do a follow up post.
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.
Why are bloggers putting adsense inside posts?
Why in the world are bloggers putting Adsense ads INSIDE OF THEIR POSTS? Alright guys I understand that they make you a lot of money because they are so close to the content but when go to a post and I can’t see ANY OF THE CONTENT ABOVE THE FOLD, we have an issue. Sometimes it is so bad I can’t even tell where the content starts and the ads end. I have ads on other sites and I keep the ads above the content or below the content not between the title of the post and the actual post itself, I mean above the title.
I will admit however that sometimes in certain formatting it is ok and it doesn’t really bother me. Such as on Ryan Shamus Dot Com where the ad is positioned on the right (not where the eye begins to look for the content) and has some distance around the ad to differentiate itself from the post.
But if you want to see something annoying look at a post page on CyberNetNews.com where there is a large ad at the top of the post in between the actual post content and the title, just annoying.
Bloggers, don’t make the ads annoying and ugly, if you need the revenue from ads at least TRY to make them look like they fit neatly into the blogs theme.