Playing around with blog ads
Heads up for readers: I’m playing around with ads on the site. Right now experimenting with an automated version where Google chooses the placement and frequency. This isn’t so much a revenue goal as a learning goal.
Last time I did ads on the site was many years ago with a completely different site design.
It was completely jarring when I first put them up this weekend, and still feel that way, but letting it play to see what I and readers think. And also to see the stats. It’s pretty powerful and cool to see what you can do with ads and analytics on the back end, and that’s what this is all about.
A few other early thoughts:
-Mobile ads that block your global nav are a joke. How is this even a thing? Or am I over-reacting to this one? Seriously, I’d like to know people’s views on this.
-What’s the line between advertising being ok and being so annoying you bail out of your chosen content source? My wife and I are huge fans of The Americans on FX and last season we started watching it online with ads, and we bailed out. Eventually some months later we paid for the show and finished season five. But for fans to bail out because of excessive ads says a lot. Then again, last season was slow. So in hindsight it was a mix of waning interest in the content and ads being an excessive barrier.
-That said, banner ads on a website aren’t a barrier to content, they’re integrated into the content. On TV, even non-paid streaming TV, you must wait through the ads and that’s a barrier too high.
-This latest experiment is to figure out if the ads are really a barrier to content or people don’t really mind them.
-And of course it’s to see if there is any economic value to the ads. I get that “media is dead” and “Google/Facebook have killed media” but that’s all bullsh*t when it comes to niche media. So I decided not to let my learning curve and knowledge lapse because of the chatter says it doesn’t matter.
Please reach out and share your knowledge on this topic. I could use the help and feedback.