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Comment by raymondgh | Hacker News Reader

The webflow ads have piqued my interest. A lot of nice little projects are shown on Show HN but I don't know if I've ever seen any to feature any sort of sponsorship right off the bat. Pretty clever to throw that in there. Do you have any lessons learned to share about the process behind it? (If it came from an easy personal connection just to show proof of concept, that's cool too!)

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Actually, I don't like it when advertising is mixed into/entangled with content. At the first glance, from the authors perspective, it sounds tricky because it is unobstructive and discrete, this kind of ad people might not want to block.

As a user, I feel manipulated. I don't trust the content any more which is not properly limited from the ads. My point is not even about adblockers or ads in general, it is just that I don't want to consume a text which does not even hide its intention to manipulate me.

However I admit that the flagging and placement of advertising is probably a matter of taste.

I think I get where you're coming from but

1. not sure what trust is required of you for content which is a gradient in the shape of an egg.

2. would you be more comfortable with ads that hid their intention to 'manipulate' you?

3. the word manipulate is pretty loaded, really they're pretty straightforward about trying to sell you something

Is this opinion only for web advertising?

Extending this to integrated advertising in movies - I'd rather see a character driving a Ford truck or drinking a can of coke than see an extra 15-30 seconds at the start of the movie watching an ad.

Thanks for the comment. I will design egg-ads more clearly. So we will try to solve this problem.

Also you've missed the changing the cursor (CSS) when you hover over the link.

Thanks for the feedback. In fact, they affiliate links. I put it to try the Egg-ads concept.

I also like the ads, nice job. Some tips:

You should increase the surface area of your <a> tags in the ads. Ideally they would cover the whole card and the egg, too. Also, consider adding a hover effect and a "pointer" cursor. I was trying to click your ads and I couldn't figure out how to!

Agreed that I was very confused in not seeing a pointer cursor on hovering _anywhere_ on the Ad card... any way this could have been made as a conscious decision to minimize the whole impression of the page being too invasive with its ads?

I added hover over shadow animation and working on adding External Link fon icon from fontawesome.com https://fontawesome.com/icons/external-link-alt?style=solid

Thanks for the feedback.

I really enjoyed that too, this is exactly how you do unobtrusive ads. I'd maybe put them on gradient backgrounds too, since the black disrupts the visual flow a bit.

I really love how well it blends in with the rest of the content. I noticed it right away but it's not distracting enough to be annoying. Nice work!

You could do a nice follow up hn blog post about the results of this experiment! Would get significant traction I imagine.

Maybe I’m missing something. But I don’t see any ads.

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