Why You Should Be Careful with Ads on Your Site

There is nothing wrong with trying to make money from a website. You put hard work into it, you provide value to other people, so you should get compensated for it.

The mistake many website owners and bloggers do, however, is to get greedy once they see real bucks coming in. That is when they put one of the following factors on the site:

• too many ads
• ads heavily blended with the content
• ads with flashy colors
• unrelated ads
• animated ads that are distracting

While in the short run these “methods” might increase your revenues, over the long term they will actually hurt your profitability. Having too many ads or intrusive ones will hurt the user experience and make you lose readers along the way.

And you don’t need to trust my advice here. Recently I came across a very short post from a Digg user where he was basically asking Digg to remove the video ads on the front page. Not only these ads were distracting because they played video, but they were also not relevant since they linked to a dating site.

Guess what, the little post created a huge buzz within the Digg community, and it received almost 4,000 diggs.
Now, if digg users, who are loyal and very attached to their site, would not stand some intrusive ads on the site, what makes you think that your readers will?

Why You Should Be Careful with Ads on Your Site