Ads on Exit133 - The Experiment

My goal with Google ads, from the beginning, was to minimize the impact on regular readers of the site while measuring ad effectiveness. Is there money to be made while not effecting readership or developing a definite bias? The first time we ran ads last year, they only appeared on the inside article pages. At the time people primarily read the website from the homepage and rarely dove much deeper. As comments were turned on and RSS readers became more popular, the inside pages were read more and this began effecting our regular readers most. Nobody complained. We turned off the ads.

Exit133 has used Google ads at least three times in the last year. The results were measured and the ads were turned off. Each time it was an experiment in effectiveness. We get requests to run ads every week from friends, local businesses, and others. We have always turned them down with the statement that maybe we’ll come up with some way to promote our friends in the future. To counter the emails I’m receiving and the blog chatter, ads are not new on blogs. Blogs we read like Curbed, Brownstoner, Jalopnik, Apartment Therapy, and Coudal all run ads of one type or another.

The issue for us is that we don’t know how effective ads would be on Exit133 without trying it out. The issue is also one of purity of design. We like simple. We like clean. The way ads are running now was considered the most intrusive form we would consider. Notice, it’s not on the home page. We turned them on to see what would happen. Did it effect site traffic patterns? Were regular users clicking on them? Or were the hundreds of folks a day that come in via search engines clicking on them? If site traffic is five times larger than the last time we ran ads, was the click through rate 5 times larger? The next step was to then change the design so that they appeared more often for folks coming off of search engines and less often for regular readers. That change will occur next week. We’ll then compare the results.

GritCity takes issue with the ads and claims that we’re now immitating them after we criticized their use ads. If you actually read the comments on Exit133 when GritCity launched, the comments were related to corporate ownership, not advertising revenue. There is a big difference. What is it with sweeping generalizations and misquotes in the press this week?