How much is too much?

Sometimes I enter others blogs, forums or websites and am getting amazed at how much advertisement do sites owners manage to press in one page. Do you know these sites where you enter - get a pop up right in your face (normally it’s either a free visa to USA or 1 million dollar lottery). Ok, warm welcome, next! Next you have a huge banner blinking in your face, spread all across the header, testing your resistance to the Parkinson syndrome. The columns on the sides are also filled with miscellaneous ads offering random services for low price, normally all lead to a referral URL. Then, through all this mess, you finally dig out a small island of content, that might as well bturn out to be disappointing. Oh, and don’t forget the ‘donate’ button for paypal. “If you like this site, please support us and donate!”. Now that they mentioned it, I never will for sure.
Don’t you know this feeling? About a site messed up with ads, not the donations part.

On the one hand, webmabmaster’s feelings are understandable. He wants to make money online, don’t we all? Naturally, he wants to push all the adverts right in your face because he gets paid for clicks. Don’t we all? The interesting part is, such websites normally make a lot less than the tidy, well laid out site, which has only a few, wisely blended in small ads.

Why? Because excess of advertisements on page, especially if we are talking about image ads that are spread all over the place, without any consideration towards the design or screen resolution or colours scheme - tend to put the visitor off. The site looks cheap, unprofessional. Visitors may not come back, nor bookmark your site for further visits.

My point is, you can earn a lot more by cleaning up your pages from unneeded referral buttons and blinking ads. If it’s blinking and irritating the hell out of your visitor that doesn’t mean it would get clicked. Check your earning stats, if your referrals brought nothing for the past half a year, it’s safe to say that either the product doesn’t fit with the traffic, or for whatever reason it just useless and takes up unneeded space on your website. Get rid of it. Get rid of all the junk, clean the page, blend the ads and make it look like a professional site, who’s owner cares for visitors convenience. Don’t let your guest know that you only need him for the measly few hits, as no one likes this attitude. If you show some respect to your users - they will respect you back. And yes, bombarding someone with a sequence of pop-ups and ads IS disrespectful. In my opinion at least it is.

Think about it, sometimes, when it comes to Ads (especially AdSense), “Less is More”. I can with full confidence confirm this, as on websites I run - ads, which take up unjustified and big space, I earn less. Less than, for example, on my History of Laurel Wreath, where there are still tons of ads, but they don’t “harass” the guests.

Author: Liza Kliko