Ads on public service pages in private website?

appropriate or annoying to have ads on a public service page

[skht]

I do a law firm website that has a page that could be considered public service. It lists the rates that medical providers are allowed to charge for copying medical records in each state. The page was intended for law firm use but has since become popular with insurance companies, medical records copying services and other law firms.

Owner wants to put advertising on the page but I'm wondering if it would just serve to annoy people and drive away traffic? His ideas include a banner ad about what the law firm does and/or rss feeds to his blog. Better to keep the page pure public service and give away info without ads? Since we know it isn't clients who are visiting the page, the people who are bookmarking it don't necessarily care about what the law firm does and won't read the ads, right?

[Syzygy]

I don't see any harm in showing ads: visitors can always choose to ignore them.

Syzygy

[monkeythumpa]

Ads are always annoying and drive people away. But you are in the real world now and driving some people away is acceptable if you can get some leads off the ads.

We just added an ad to the middle of our articles and pageviews went down by 7%. Revenue from ads per page is up 45%. Color me greedy.

[Syzygy]

We just added an ad to the middle of our articles and pageviews went down by 7%.

Colour me confused, but surely visitors don't know there's an ad in the middle of the article until they click on the page... ;-)

Syzygy

[monkeythumpa]

They don't know until they hit the page and at that point they make a desicion to click to another page or not. I guess pageviews per session would be a more accurate term.

[UserFriendly]

I imagine you're suffering a loss of repeat custom, too.

I've added leaderboards to the tops of my pages, and I did worry that it would irritate my visitors. I am, however, offering the sort of pages that people will almost certainly only visit once.

However, I am interested in the topic of ads driving people away. Does anyone have any links to case studies along these lines? Most successful place to put an ad in order to drive away half of all users, etc.