Our business strategy with online advertising is simple but has proven effective: advertise honestly, relevantly and reasonably, and if the advertising saturation is going to be very high then offer a way to buy out of it completely. If you have good content and treat your site visitors with some level of respect then they will stick around and will buy from you. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but someday enough visitors will start doing business with you to make good money from your work. What comes around goes around. Really, would you do business with someone who slaps your face while you are trying to read/use their work?

As a user/reader or whatever you want to call me, I have and will continue to click and buy from advertising that is utilyzed similarly to how we do advertising across our websites. I want webmasters to make money and can and do pay those who provide good content on websites, that’s the way the magic of the web works. Those who live in the fantasy that the web should be totally free aren’t being realistic. I have absolutely no problem with websites making money and enjoy supporting those who do things right.

It’s easy getting caught up in signing up for too many different/competing programs that look cool and then scattering the ads all over what was once a good content site. Too easy to do. This is where the “caution” part comes into the title of this post.

At the same time over saturating content — too much content — with no money plans isn’t a good idea financially either. If visitors are to continue to enjoy your good content then it’s necessary to have a foundation to pay for it and advertising can be a great way to do that. This is one of my beefs with podcasting, actually. All kinds of bandwidth going out the door, often quite wastefully, for a very small (often it’s zero) return in dollars. That is not a long term, viable, sustainable business model. Please don’t anybody try to sell me on the whole hobbyist “it’s not about the money” spiel because for the vast majority of people sooner or later it is always about the money. Roof over head, food on table, hole in the ground.

However, advertising that is grossly unrelated, jammed down my throat and/or intrudes on my browsing/reading experience obscenely will result in me either a) not returning to the site and/or b) not clicking any ad on the site. The website loses with my business if the advertising becomes obscene. I’m just one person voting with his feet but if enough people feel similarly it will begin to impact the income. Sometimes it’s a soft scamper away in the night and other times you can hear the pounding of departing footsteps.

Just clicked through to this blog entry and the first thing I thought was: where is the content? Oh, it’s there, alright, beneath the fold. The homepage for this blog isn’t this way, but the entry page is almost entirely ad-saturated in the entry browser window. I wouldn’t be linking to this at all if the content — once readers get to it — wasn’t worthwhile.

This layout is somewhat reminiscent of this post only in that case:

1) the obscuring advertising wasn’t intentional, it had slipped by the eyes of the webmaster and was removed after pointing this out
2) they were paying for their own hosting and writers so they had real world expenses

This is a free blogspot hosted blog which looks to be penned by one author. The traffic looks pretty good by the Site Meter stats so I’m sure this blog is making some money, but it could make more without being so offensive. Ironically the post I’m linking to is about using Adbrite in association with Adsense to make more money from the blog. Doh!

I wonder how many of those readers are gone before ever visiting the advertisers or the content in the scroll? Sure, some could argue that nobody reads content on the web any more, it’s all done through RSS, but that’s not true. The percentage of website visitors to RSS readers is very high especially when the content in the RSS feed is excerpt-only. About the only saving grace for this blog is the content — once you get to it — is worthwhile and there are no ads (yet) in the excerpt RSS feed. If this blogger adds advertisements to the RSS feed it will become a completely unserviceable RSS feed.

When/if readers do scroll they will see content that’s not too bad, but lookout, here’s the closing message:

I recently installed Adbrite (Look at “Your ad here” on top of sidebar) on this blog - and am still looking for advertisers!

My goodness, this blogger is looking for more advertising?

• 10 (deadly sins) ads in a single RSS feed post, get out of here
• Coulter’s comment about John Edwards sends three advertisers for exits
• Advertising deception: Yoda, not coda
• Don’t have RSS feed, don’t want one, too bad, they can now use Feed43
• Google Adsense RSS beta public launch
• Fark a sellout, Pluck a hypocrite and deeplinking responsibility?