Don't Let Ads Kill Your Site

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I'm not sure when it occurred or why it happened, but somewhere along the way I started to look at every ad on the web that I came across. I became fascinated by these banners no matter their size. I was left in wonderment as to why anyone would plaster so many ads on a site knowing they have to be distracting to their audience. Actually, that is a lie, it is obvious why sites do it and it is because people pay them to. A better question is why does there have to be so many?

Couldn't you simply have less ads and sell them at a higher rate? It seems to work really for The Deck and Fusion Ads. I guess the problem is most advertisers don't want to pay a premium to be placed on your website so you lower the price and to make up for the money you think you are losing you put more ads up believing it doesn't hurt anyone. In the short term you are probably right, but eventually your ad placing habits will become an addiction and your readers will start to notice.

If you can keep on producing content they enjoy they might not mind them, TechCrunch is a great example, but everyone has a breaking point and most of the time you won't notice what the breaking point of your audience is because you are too busy counting the dollars. Sooner or later though you will notice them leaving and when they leave, the ad dollars start to go with them. I mean, do you really need to squeeze out another dollar? If you think you do then shouldn't you be focused on other ways to make money with the audience you have worked so hard to gain?

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You do realize that there is only so much money to go around right? Of course you do and that is why you make sure to sell your ad space at a very low price. The other day I came across a website that was selling six ad spaces for $10 a piece. One space was bought so there were five empty spaces sitting on this poor site. Not only was the person selling at a price that seemed useless, but instead of actually looking at the site I couldn't stop looking at the blank ad spaces.

Isn't it safe to assume that the ad market is always saturated to the point of explosion? You really think that when you start to build up your site that advertisers are going to come knocking down your door? They already have the traffic they want and probably aren't even happy with the conversion rate they are getting.

What's that? You thought when businesses spend money on advertising they are always happy with the results? You are so silly. Most companies are happy if they get a 1% click through rate on their ads and they are lucky to get that on a site that features 28 of their competitors. Not only do you have to keep your audience happy, but you also have to keep the advertisers happy. They want to be in front of your audience, but what good does it do them if nobody clicks? They know they are getting horrible results, but continue to advertise with you because their competition does.

What if one day a site came along that reached the same audience as you and could promise a better click through rate? You don't think an advertiser would love to jump at an opportunity like that? They could leave their competitors to fight for scraps on your site while they get primetime real estate on another site. Don't worry though, this scenario will never happen to you because you have been rolling 4-5 digits deep every month for a very long time.

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You might have started a website because you wanted to reach people. Maybe you had other reasons, but know that over time your audience will become aware of what your true intentions are (look at the advertising models of Digg vs. Reddit). If you are simply there to make money, both your content and design will reflect that and people will catch on. Eventually, it gets to the point where you become a dinosaur in your own industry. A graveyard site that people only refer to when they talk about the glory days.

It doesn't have to end up like that. If you truly care about your audience and you want to stick to the initial goals you had when you started the website then you have to get creative. Keep in mind that more isn't always more. 37signals proves that with their products as well as Apple.

Maybe you could produce an e-book every 6 months or year with all the great content you have produced. Smashing Magazine wrote a paperback book and although I don't know how many they have sold you almost have to assume it is a lot. You could create a premium section of your site for people to subscribe to. Maybe your site does a great job of producing leads for your design business and if that is the case try not to get greedy. It is hard for potential customers to understand if you are just writing a blog with advertisements or if you actually do provide design services.

I understand the need to have advertising on a site so this isn't a blast against sites that make top dollar with advertising. This is a plea asking them to take a step back and look at their sites to see if advertising has become the dominant content on their site. Have you ever tried to read an issue of GQ? It's impossible because every other page is an ad. Some sites can get away with this and there is a good chance that yours isn't one of them.

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I might be the naive one though when it comes to ads. I know savvy users can use an add-on such as Ad-Block Plus to prevent showing any ads on a page, but I like to think that there is a compromise that makes all parties (advertisers, site owners, audience) happy. Is it wrong to assume you could charge more by putting up less ads? As an advertiser what is the breaking point when you say enough is enough and avoid a site because there are too many ads?

If you think I went a bit overboard with how may ads are on this page, haven't you visited a site before and felt just as overwhelmed? I won't even get into the fact that the majority of ads are poorly designed and offer me no incentive to click. If you are going to be one ad in a million at least do your best to lure potential customers in. Having an ad up just because you know you should market your product defeats the whole purpose of marketing.

Enough talk though, I am going to try something different. I am going to put an ad up on this site starting in 2010. It will be just one ad space for the whole year. No other ads will be shown. However, having the same ad every single day doesn't help an advertiser because people start to tune it out and I would get annoyed myself seeing the same ad continuously. So the ad will be a different ad every single day. Instead of buying the space for a month you can buy it for a day.

To avoid having to worry about pricing, the rate of the ad will increase with the growth of the site. $1 is added to the rate every day so January 1 will be $1 and December 31 will be $365. You could be front and center of the Drawar commuity for $1. I don't plan on selling out every day of the year so to help others in the industry I will fill those empty days with an ad for a site, person or charity I admire.

I have nothing against sites like BuySellAds that put money in the pockets of great sites. I wish they were around 6 years ago. I just have a bad habit of thinking there is more than one way to do something so this will be my way. For an industry full of creatives there doesn't seem to be too much creativity going around, we can fix that together.

Interested in purchasing an ad space on Drawar? Check out the Advertise page for details.