Inline advertising

[joemako]

Chris,

I am not upset, just concerned.

The other day I stopped by the forum and saw advertising that looks like comment spam, flash banner adds as replies. It looks like spam because I fail to see how things like weight loss and women in bikini videos relate to Visio.

I will not click on them for three reasons, they look like spam, since they are flash I can not see the URL they will send me to (are they safe to click on, how do I know it does not link to something not good?), and from what I can see about what they are offering or selling, I am not interested.

If they are here by your design, I would urge you to reconsider their content and method of delivery to look less spammy.

Maybe there are companies that sell products and services related to Visio or other professional services that would be interested in advertising and supporting your site.

--
Best Regards,
Joe

[Visio Guy]

Hi Joe,

The ads are served automatically. I've noticed the junk too (Puzzle Pirates!?!), and I'm trying to figure out to what extent I can filter the ads or target them to the audience better. For one of the advertisers, I explicitly un-clicked all the advertisements that they themselves flagged as dodgey, but we're still seeing the junk. I was particularly surprised at what Google offered. On the Visio Guy site, their stuff has almost always been marginally related to the content.

It could be that the forum is not being properly crawled by search engines. It takes time for me to learn all of this stuff and implemented.

One thing that I've noticed, is that over time, the ads on http://www.visguy.com have gotten better and more pertinent. There are actually a lot of interesting products popping up!

The ads on this forum, however, still seem quite odd. Also, it's hard for me to know what you're seeing, since I am currently in Vienna, and am getting different ads in German.

Thanks for your concern, and sorry about the junk!

[Lars-Erik]

*Cough*
Opinions are of course split, web masters complain (duh)
where users are happy

Though I suppose I should turn it off for this site, to support it.

-Lars

[Visio Guy]

If I were to write a license agreement for the Visio Guy sites, it would state that the ads are part of the content, and blocking them is a violation of the license agreement. If there were a mod that blocked content to browsers running ad-blockers, I would install it. It costs money and a lot of time to run the web-site and this forum. Advertising supports some of that effort.

That being said, I agree whole-heartedly with joemako that the ads should be pertinent to the content, and I am working on this. I don't believe in pop-up ads or the ones that start sucking bandwidth by playing videos in some off-screen corner of the page. You won't find them here.

[joemako]

Just read this article:
"Ads are the new online tip jar" from http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/ads-are-the-new.html

If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don't have to buy anything (though it's fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click.

You still get what you pay for, even if you pay with attention.

and his followup post:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/beating-the-sta.html

Who wins?

Surfers, who get more great content and might actually learn about something they want to invest in.

Content providers, who get more money in the short run and in the long run, as more ads convert more people.

Advertisers, who can begin to reach the unreachable non-clickers.

[Visio Guy]

Oh, my, I would never ask people to click on ads to support this site. If people click "to be nice", then the value of the ads should probably go down, as the success rate of the ads plummets. In the end, it could probably destroy the revenue stream.

I hope that the ads are pertinent to the content of Visio Guy, and that the products are of interest and of use to our readers. It seems to me that content-driven ads represent an extremely efficient market - connecting customers with the products they theoretically actually are interested in, instead of blanket marketing.

But there is a bit of a conflict. I try to create outstanding content to bring people to this site, but then I want people to leave by clicking ads so that I make money. Kind of weird, I haven't figured it all out yet.

The real tip jars are the donations - the PayPal button, or the "buy me a beer" button.

And I should probably offer valuable, for-sale e-books, utilities and products that expand upon the free content of the web-site.