Lots of ads on the article pages
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I haven't had lot of time to read some articles lately but I noticed that there is a lot of noise caused by ads at the end of an article. There is: a skyscraper ad on the right (which stays in place) a rectangle ad besides the license info and the share buttons (right above the author info) a banner below the author info And in addition to that there are 4 rows of "you may also be interested in..." before you get to the discussion board I like to support codeproject by disabling my adblocker but I feel that there are a few too many of them :) If you don't know what I mean: Tell me that this[^] doesn't look cluttered...
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I haven't had lot of time to read some articles lately but I noticed that there is a lot of noise caused by ads at the end of an article. There is: a skyscraper ad on the right (which stays in place) a rectangle ad besides the license info and the share buttons (right above the author info) a banner below the author info And in addition to that there are 4 rows of "you may also be interested in..." before you get to the discussion board I like to support codeproject by disabling my adblocker but I feel that there are a few too many of them :) If you don't know what I mean: Tell me that this[^] doesn't look cluttered...
It's always a balance and we try really, really hard to not make the ads obnoxious. When you first view an article you'll see two ads. Just two. Then as you scroll down you'll certainly come across the box ad and finally the bottom leaderboard. The tower ad is in the fixed side column so you can definitely get a situation where you'll see 3 ads. The "Also read" are to try and show articles and research papers that are relevant and of interest. We want to encourage readers to explore some of the thousands of brilliant articles written by our authors and there's only so much room on a page. I'm always happy to play around with placement: I could move the social sharing buttons, or move the "also read" to the very bottom (not super useful then) or move the box ad halfway up an article (really tricky since we don't control article layout). We're a free site and we need ads, but I never want to have the noise outweigh the reading experience.
cheers Chris Maunder
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It's always a balance and we try really, really hard to not make the ads obnoxious. When you first view an article you'll see two ads. Just two. Then as you scroll down you'll certainly come across the box ad and finally the bottom leaderboard. The tower ad is in the fixed side column so you can definitely get a situation where you'll see 3 ads. The "Also read" are to try and show articles and research papers that are relevant and of interest. We want to encourage readers to explore some of the thousands of brilliant articles written by our authors and there's only so much room on a page. I'm always happy to play around with placement: I could move the social sharing buttons, or move the "also read" to the very bottom (not super useful then) or move the box ad halfway up an article (really tricky since we don't control article layout). We're a free site and we need ads, but I never want to have the noise outweigh the reading experience.
cheers Chris Maunder
Small, possible improvement to the also read "box": Can you make the thumbnails a bit smaller, personally I don't need them but I can see that they might add something for people and for me they do more harm than good (especially if there is an thumbnail that can't be displayed, that seems to bug me more than it should :) ) Even on my 24" screen (1920x1200 resolution) that box takes up half the screen, and combined with the "about the author" box and the add in between almost the whole screen, so to get to the comments I have to scroll an entire screen, for new users they might not find the comments section at all like this.
Tom
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Small, possible improvement to the also read "box": Can you make the thumbnails a bit smaller, personally I don't need them but I can see that they might add something for people and for me they do more harm than good (especially if there is an thumbnail that can't be displayed, that seems to bug me more than it should :) ) Even on my 24" screen (1920x1200 resolution) that box takes up half the screen, and combined with the "about the author" box and the add in between almost the whole screen, so to get to the comments I have to scroll an entire screen, for new users they might not find the comments section at all like this.
Tom
Try now.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Try now.
cheers Chris Maunder
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I shrunk the thumbnails 20% as well. The missing icons are cache inconsistencies (we changed the data we're expecting so the cache is sending us back bad data - they should be good in a couple of minutes).
cheers Chris Maunder
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It's always a balance and we try really, really hard to not make the ads obnoxious. When you first view an article you'll see two ads. Just two. Then as you scroll down you'll certainly come across the box ad and finally the bottom leaderboard. The tower ad is in the fixed side column so you can definitely get a situation where you'll see 3 ads. The "Also read" are to try and show articles and research papers that are relevant and of interest. We want to encourage readers to explore some of the thousands of brilliant articles written by our authors and there's only so much room on a page. I'm always happy to play around with placement: I could move the social sharing buttons, or move the "also read" to the very bottom (not super useful then) or move the box ad halfway up an article (really tricky since we don't control article layout). We're a free site and we need ads, but I never want to have the noise outweigh the reading experience.
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
We're a free site and we need ads,
Yeah, I understand that. And when I usually use a site regularly and the ads aren't affecting my experience much (e.g. by punching me in the facing with a flashy animation) then I disable AdBlock on it to support the site. Looks already quite a bit better with only 3 rows of the "also read" and the smaller thumbnails. :) You could maybe move the ad above "also read" to above (or even below?) the discussion board. I don't know much about ad placement too much (and how the revenue based on the placement is, and I could imagine a banner on the top might be worth more than one on the bottom). You're the marketing guy (no offense meant :laugh:), so you could enlighten me here ;-)
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Chris Maunder wrote:
We're a free site and we need ads,
Yeah, I understand that. And when I usually use a site regularly and the ads aren't affecting my experience much (e.g. by punching me in the facing with a flashy animation) then I disable AdBlock on it to support the site. Looks already quite a bit better with only 3 rows of the "also read" and the smaller thumbnails. :) You could maybe move the ad above "also read" to above (or even below?) the discussion board. I don't know much about ad placement too much (and how the revenue based on the placement is, and I could imagine a banner on the top might be worth more than one on the bottom). You're the marketing guy (no offense meant :laugh:), so you could enlighten me here ;-)
So as the Marketing guy what I really need to do is have the bottom banner attached to your cursor. As you move it around, the banner follows. Obviously I'd make it so the banner move to the left or right depending on where you were on the screen so as to ensure it wasn't blocking anything important (ie. other banners). In all seriousness it's not so much the placement as the context. Ads should be placed where they will 1. Get immediate attention (eg 'above the fold', or 'top of page' placements), or 2. Eventually get attention (next to something down the page that you will most certainly pause to read), or 3. Possibly get attention, but only show if you get there (eg bottom of the page, but only show them if you scroll down enough) with a caveat on 3 being 3a. possibly get attention by not being drowned out by something else With an overall guideline being 4. Not interrupt the overall reading experience of the thing the readers have come for: the main content. Item #4 is what I see broken all the time. In fact it's getting stupid: you go to a site to read and within 5 seconds there's a popup demanding you sign up for their newsletter. With regards to our banners, having it at the very, very bottom fits with 3, but could possibly be affected by 3a: it would be lost. The trick is not losing it without violating 4.
cheers Chris Maunder
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So as the Marketing guy what I really need to do is have the bottom banner attached to your cursor. As you move it around, the banner follows. Obviously I'd make it so the banner move to the left or right depending on where you were on the screen so as to ensure it wasn't blocking anything important (ie. other banners). In all seriousness it's not so much the placement as the context. Ads should be placed where they will 1. Get immediate attention (eg 'above the fold', or 'top of page' placements), or 2. Eventually get attention (next to something down the page that you will most certainly pause to read), or 3. Possibly get attention, but only show if you get there (eg bottom of the page, but only show them if you scroll down enough) with a caveat on 3 being 3a. possibly get attention by not being drowned out by something else With an overall guideline being 4. Not interrupt the overall reading experience of the thing the readers have come for: the main content. Item #4 is what I see broken all the time. In fact it's getting stupid: you go to a site to read and within 5 seconds there's a popup demanding you sign up for their newsletter. With regards to our banners, having it at the very, very bottom fits with 3, but could possibly be affected by 3a: it would be lost. The trick is not losing it without violating 4.
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
So as the Marketing guy what I really need to do is have the bottom banner attached to your cursor. As you move it around, the banner follows. Obviously I'd make it so the banner move to the left or right depending on where you were on the screen so as to ensure it wasn't blocking anything important (ie. other banners).
It's not like the marketing people didn't try, didn't they? :laugh:
Chris Maunder wrote:
With regards to our banners, having it at the very, very bottom fits with 3, but could possibly be affected by 3a: it would be lost. The trick is not losing it without violating 4.
At least for you it's all about placing as many ads on a page as you can without affecting the intended user experience. This is way better than to just punch a user with as many ads as you can before he leaves and never returns. :) I regularly encounter those sites with these newsletter popus as well (usually by following links from the daily news). But those definitely aren't sites that I keep visiting after that. The hassle simply isn't worth the chance of finding valuable or interesting content. Some news pages used to suggest some other article with a small box on the bottom right. The content then rotated through different articles there. Found this kinda nice, but I don't really see it anymore. I supposed, that didn't really catch on.
