Don’t Use In Content Advertising
It Annoys Users And Isn’t That Profitable
More and more I am seeing blogs which are being monetized using a new form of contextual advertising. These are ads like those displayed by Intellitxt or Kontera Contentlink (no affiliate code in those links )Although this method of advertising is barely acceptable on forums, don’t do it in your blog.
I’m sure you’ve seen the advertising I mean. It is the ads which appear as double underlined links in a person’s content. If you mouse over that link it will display an ad. If you click the link you will follow it to the advertisers site. The problem with these links is that they are too easily confused with sites you intend to link too.
The intext ads prey on the trust you have built with your readers. Your readers will click on the ads thinking that they are a link you put there intentionally to send them to an interesting or useful site. When they end up on a paid advertisement site, more often than not they will be upset.
I have stopped visiting several blogs which made to much use of intext advertising. Several blogs that I used to frequent took it even a step further. Besides just displaying the content ads, they modified their CSS so that all their ads were double underlined. That made it impossible to tell which links were worth clicking and which were not! As a result, after a couple of misclicks, I simply stopped visiting those sites.
The bottom line is that your visitors are too valuable for you to lose by displaying the in content ads. There are many different methods of monetizing your site which can perform much better. Pick a different method and your users will thank you for it.
on June 8th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Kontera: Show on older posts only!
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