Hacker News Reader

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.