
Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate
experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.
Member since:
2006-02-15
I find those Google AdWords et al a much more pleasurable alternative to big, flashy animations. Especially since the links then actually are somehow related to the topic at hand whereas a random animation will be exactly that: random.
Besides, those Adwords and whatnot do not take any more screen real-estate than the actual content does. As such I just don't really have anything against them. I do block animations, large full-screen ads and all that rubbish, but if I could somehow switch to Adwords version of a site with no such animated crap I'd go for it.
As such, why not just allow your visitors to choose the type of advertising they prefer, and for the Flash/images/animations/etc category of ads use some brains and carefully select what kinds of ads you display?