I ask you, dear reader, to glance at the page surrounding the words you are reading. Look for any advertisements? Found ‘em? No you say? Well good.
Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry and supports lots of my favorite sites. This post isn’t a condemnation of the industry as a whole, just of those that misuse it. I’m talking to you site-that-keeps-snagging-my-content-and-running-it-on-an-ad-covered-page. Since the beginning of my webdays there have been no ads on my pages. I don’t do this out of some hatred of the online advertising industry, in fact my paychecks come from that industry. I also don’t do this because of a lack of traffic, my pages do surprisingly well. I do this because I believe that content comes first.
I work for a company that our main product is adserving technology. I spend all day troubleshooting issues for pages that are more ads then content and some of these folks are making a killing doing it. There’s nothing wrong with monetizing your website, but too many people do it tothe detriment of what should be their main focus, content. Online ads can be obnoxious if not done well, and even then are often a jarring transition from content to advertisement. Most of us hate this, myself included. I told myself from day 1 that unless I could find a way to make ads PART of my content, then my site wouldn’t have any. To this date, I’ve yet to come up with a system that was clean enough for my liking so there are no ads on my site.
