CT Biz Blogs

I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with ads on blogs. In fact, I toyed with the idea myself. But since one of my aims is to use this blog to communicate with clients, I decided not to go that route.

Back in the days when Google first bought Blogger (only about a year or two ago, but that’s forever in internet time), ads were mandatory — they were on the very top of the blog, above the name. That was ok, because the blog was free, after all. They’ve since changed that policy, because they are heavily promoting AdSense.

Now we find that AOL is putting ads on their member’s blogs. That’s just plain wrong. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

There are three things about ads that bug me: ad-encrusted blogs, ads in RSS feeds, and sneaky ads.

Ad-encrusted blogs are the ones with ads on both sidebars, at the beginning of every post, in every other blank spot available — between posts and between the comment header and the comments. And some even have ads in the text, in the form of highlighted words that have popup ads when you mouse over them!

This is too much. Is this a blog or a billboard? I stay away from those types of blogs, with, I’ll admit, one or two rare exceptions. There are some blogs that actually do have some good content to them, and don’t use every one of those types of ads, although they come close.

Some bloggers are making their income from the ads on their blogs. There’s nothing wrong with that. But, there’s such a thing as usability, for heaven’s sake. If I go into a store, and it’s crammed full of salespeople jumping out at me, I probably won’t stay very long. I don’t want to be ambushed in every aisle. In a website, I need white space. I need to be able to use my mouse without having something jump out at me. If I come across a “bill-blog,” a billboard masquerading as a blog, I keep my mouse on the scroll bar and get out as soon as I can.

And ads in RSS bug me, big-time. If I see those in a feed, I just unsubscribe. I might still wander over to the site from time-to time, if I think of it. If you want me to come to your blog (to see your ads), then just use excerpts in the feed. Useful excerpts, not just headlines and one line of text. I’ll go over to the blog if I think the post is interesting enough (unless it’s a billblog, or bullblog). Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s premier blogger, doesn’t like less than full posts in feeds. I don’t, either. But I’d rather have that than ads.

And here’s the thing that really, really, annoys me — sneaky, deceptive ads that are booby-traps for the unwary. More and more ads are not looking like ads, these days. I hate this. To me this says “I need to make money, and if I do it by fooling you into clicking on something, well then, Ka-ching!” I know they don’t get the money from me. They get it from Google or whoever is sponsoring the ad. But I don’t like having my time wasted. And I don’t like being made to feel a fool.

I’m not talking here about those dumb popups that look like dialog boxes from the computer. But some bloggers are doing the weblog equivalent - they’re making the ads look like part of the actual content of the blog. It’s one thing to have a matching color scheme, and strategic placement, but put a box around the ad, please! (”Oh no,” say the bill-bloggers, “that would make people realize that it’s an ad!”) And the ads along the top that look like navigational links are a bad, bad idea. It’s mis-using a convention, and counting on deceiving people, at least once, by not having a box around the whole thing.

Here’s the deal — I’ve been doing enough reading of blogs (and of the ad optimization stuff on Google) to spot this crap. But as more and more people get into reading blogs, and blogging, they will be fooled once or twice, and then never come back. And it creates distrust towards the blogger who stoops to that stuff. I won’t “hover” my cursor over a darn thing in some blogs, for example. Pretty soon, people won’t be clicking on links, either. And that will ruin a good thing for everybody.