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Horrible Adwords.
| Thu, 2006-02-02 17:48 | |
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Oh my god....
This is directed to you eric. Can't you find any better way to finance this site then those adwords? They are truely horrible, and totally demote the value of the entire site in my oppinon. They destroy readability of the site, and now it looks like all you care about is getting ad money from the site. They totally take focus from the real information content on the site. If you don't know what I mean, I mean the script going over the page and finding "keywords", that they underline and connect a pop up ad to it... There is tons of other ad exchange programs, that doesn't make your site look like a cheap warez/porn/satcard site, why not use any of those? As a content provider, I truely enjoyed helping users on this site with various symbian problems, and I think my presence has been valued. But I refuse doing this for a site that doesn't care about its users, but slap big popups in their face at every opportunity. It would at least be nice with some explaination... How much of an economic crisis are you in? Maybe we could start a collection or something... |
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Forum posts: 140
Paul Todd
Forum posts: 2006
Note that I don't like it much either but we need to get more revenue from the site so that we can hire a full time programmer to work and enhance it. See it as a kind of trade-off. However I won't run these if I get too many negative feedbacks.
So anyone, please feel free to give your opinion.... (I am also interested if you like or don't mind it... not just if you dislike;-) )
Thanks.
Eric Bustarret
NewLC Founder & CEO / Professional Symbian OS Consultant
Forum posts: 140
Also, in case you did'nt know, the "wireless" in you signiture actually points to TMobile!
Paul Todd
Forum posts: 78
These underlined adwords - well, they are quite ok, maybe there's just too many. Eric, would it be possible to limit the amount of underlined keywords?
Another thing is that exactly on this kind of help-oriented highly technical site it might not be very profitable to run this kind of ads. NewLC is already the best site of its kind on the web, it's rather unlikely that a lot of people will click ads (i.e. outgoing links) pointing to the other places. It is already the best place.
What I believe could be worth experimenting with is to try getting affiliate contacts. Look at the typical AdSense block here. It is filled with CodeWarrior, IntelliJ IDEA, Wireless PDA SW, etc. You can try contacting them directly about putting their banners. Maybe about putting specific banners into relevant articles. Note, that simultaneously you could get their help for building the tutorials on the tools
Compilable Symbian Code Examples
Forum posts: 1242
IMHO they are rather ugly.
Is this pay-per-click? If yes, I dare to predict that the click-through rate will be rather low and will probably make the whole thing not worth the bother. After the very first curiosity about this novel system itself is satisfied, why should somebody get near these words and not avoid them, because after all people are here to read the postings...
On the other hand, the AdSense advertisements here are very interesting, it is a pity that there are so few of them that Google seems worthy of display so the same ones are displayed over and over.
René Brunner
Forum posts: 1233
Exta annoying that they tend to pop up just you pass your mouse over them.
Makes the whole experience rather silly.. trying to find useful information about something, but constantly have to go zig-zag between irrelevant commersial messages.
I know that I atleast, would never have started posting here, if they were present at that time. I would have instantly judge the site as not serious, and useless, and probably not even try to search it more then a few times of getting redirected to buy lawnmovers instead.
I don't think I am alone on this, and it would be a shame, since this site actually is very useful.
I don't mind ads though, as long as they don't overtake the information content. Go for more nonintrusive ads instead. Taken a look at google ads? they tend to have context sensitivity that actually works...
Forum posts: 2006
As I told you, I am not totally convinced by the solution in term of usability but I must admit it is quite effective compared to the other kind of advertisement we are running.
Eric Bustarret
NewLC Founder & CEO / Professional Symbian OS Consultant
Forum posts: 16
Boom
Boomslang Studios
Forum posts: 45
Thanks for reducing the number of adwords - makes things better.
I guess if it gets too awful I would install some greasemonkey script to block the adwords, but I very much doubt you'll get a lot of revenue from them then (if it's a per-click basis).
--
Kibi
Give me immortality - or give me death!
Forum posts: 214
I really hope that there wont be those floating ads that you have to click to see the contents behind.
"I only know that I know nothing." (Socrates)
Forum posts: 78
Don't know about how and where to put the ads for it and what the price tag could be, but it should be possible to somehow bring to the visitor attention a message "Cannot solve this problem and the forum didn't help? Ask for a paid consultancy from NewLC".
Compilable Symbian Code Examples
Forum posts: 1233
The companies advertising is mostly ripped off, since 9/10 clicks are "out of curiousity" or by mistake, and isn't a likely customer for the advertiser.
Site visitors also lose, since the real information content on the site is obfuscated.
Number of new visitors returning drops, since the possibility increases that the new visitor confuses the ads with the information content, and deems the site useless.
This makes new visitors lose, since they could have found the information, if it wasn't obfuscated by ads.
This also makes site owners lose, if they have real content and want return customers.
The devilish thing is that an uncritical site owner trying it out, will think its good, since it will in the beginning generate lots of clicks when the return customers wonder what it is, and tries if it is something new and useful.
Then it should drop, when there is only new customers clicking by choice.
For the return customers it is then only an annoyance, since they have found the fucntion to be useless on the first few test clicks.
So return customers lose again. Some of them will get annoyed and leave for sites that doesn't annoy them.
my 2c again...
Forum posts: 1233
The companies advertising is mostly ripped off, since 9/10 clicks are "out of curiousity" or by mistake, and isn't a likely customer for the advertiser.
Site visitors also lose, since the real information content on the site is obfuscated.
Number of new visitors returning drops, since the possibility increases that the new visitor confuses the ads with the information content, and deems the site useless.
This makes new visitors lose, since they could have found the information, if it wasn't obfuscated by ads.
This also makes site owners lose, if they have real content and want return customers.
The devilish thing is that an uncritical site owner trying it out, will think its good, since it will in the beginning generate lots of clicks when the return customers wonder what it is, and tries if it is something new and useful.
Then it should drop, when there is only new customers clicking by choice.
For the return customers it is then only an annoyance, since they have found the fucntion to be useless on the first few test clicks.
So return customers lose again. Some of them will get annoyed and leave for sites that doesn't annoy them.
minimizing the adwords makes something bad a little bit less bad, and reduce the above factors, but its still a bad idea to begin with.
my 2c again...