Can you have too much advertising?

[Livenomadic]

There is one site that I hate with a passion, that is <snip> and <snip>.

Why? because on every page of content they have 11 different ads! And these arent small ads either, these are huge ads, text ads, adsense, and banners of every size and shape.

The poor article is overwhelmed with flashing, shaking, moving, and spinning advertisments.

Now, I hate it from a usability stand point. But there must a obvious reason that they sold their site's soul to advertisers.

Do they really make that much more with all those ads or does the layout keep visitors away (or atleast not coming back)?

[edited by: trillianjedi at 7:01 pm (utc) on Sep. 13, 2004]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[trillianjedi]

Can you have too much advertising?

There's always a risk it will make the site look "cheap".

So, yes, imo.

TJ

[disgust]

I agree, but you also may want to consider that the more you're considered an authority site, the more you can generally get away with.

[yowza]

There is a forum website that I visit that has a whole lot of ads. The worst of the ads is a HUGE self-promotional ad in the middle of every page that asks you to sign in. The first few times I visited this site, I didn't realize that the thread continued under the huge ad because the ad takes up nearly the entire page. I would always leave the site because the forum seemed incomplete and I thought I had to sign in to see the rest of the thread. Luckily they had good enough rankings that I inadvertently revisited them and discovered that the thread continued on the bottom of the page.

The moral of this story is that their ads distracted me from finding the content on their pages so I left their website. Although I did return to their website, other people may not ever return.

[Livenomadic]

<Self Snipped>

[karmov]

Can you have too much advertising?

Most deffinitely. Trillianjedi is right in saying that ads make your site look cheap. The better the ads, the less cheap your site looks, but even a great ad will make your site look a little cheap. Now the revenue these ads generate are clearly worth the tradeoff for most of the webmasters out there, but I'm sure if most of them were offered some magical revenue model so they could remove the ads, but still maintain their income, the ads would vanish.