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Comment by melomal | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree but the reality of it is, most people want to monetize but they cannot outside of ads or ebooks etc. Your drivel may only reach X number of people but when you are getting Y amount of readers, I guarantee you will look to find a way to monetize, because your time is money.

What about ads that have to adhere to a style guide of the website/blog? As it, the font styles, colours etc do not have to be exact match, but close enough that it would fit into the website. The other side of this is that Google has done this and so has Quora and sometimes it feels a little crappy that they do this.

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I don't agree, I will not look to find a way to monetize, because I do not work for money. My time is not money, my time is worth a lot more than that.

In part, it is because I have been tempted by monetization before, after achieving a large readership on several websites I administered in the past, and it never worked out in my favor. Even when I received 10K USD in a year running non-tracking, text-only ads on one site, I think I was doing myself a disservice, cheapening the apparent/perceived value of the content.

I don't want ads on my website, ever. And I think any website with ads is lowering its own value and the quality of the website and the perceived value of the content as well, and getting very little in return. Only large content aggregators who compile huge piles of content can make ads worth it.

I don't see how font styles and colors affect the cost of the website. Could you elaborate on that, please?

Quora has crap content, and I don't read it, nor click their links. Their entire objective is monetization and lock-in, and it is very rare that I see a Quora article that's worth the trouble of obtaining it. Putting text which you wrote into Quora is doing yourself a disservice, because it is immediately placed behind a monetization barrier, and made inaccessible to many.

Google has a very good content engine, but they are a content aggregator, as mentioned above. They are also just barely balancing out between making content more accessible vs placing it behind a barrier inaccessible to many.

> I think I was doing myself a disservice

Were you able to run a data comparison in terms of users/time on site/number of pages etc. I would assume that this in itself would clearly tell you if the ads were harmful or not.

> I don't see how font styles and colors affect the cost of the website

What I mean by this is that when you visit a site with these native ads, the ads themselves would have to adhere to strict design requirements laid out by the publisher. The idea being that it is less intrusive for the overall UX which in reality should limit the problems you mentioned in terms of 'quality'.

The neon, 90's style banner ads are very off putting when you browsing a site, which is what the above is trying to combat.

Here,s what I mean by that:

I,ve gone through all the effort of writing my content... Publishing my content... I have been blessed with a visitor who is interested in what I have to say... Joy!

I want them to read what I have written, potentially changing their life for the better. It would be a great honor and privilege, in fact. It is the main reason I write.

If I had a choice between that and a ten-dollar clickthrough to an affiliate, I would not make the trade. It may not seem like an either-or choice, but it is.

Their time is also very limited, it is the scarcest resource any of us have, and their attention span is fickle. Even if their attention strays for a split-second by looking at the ad, I have already lost them, potentially to never have them again.

I don,t need data to tell me that anything extraneous I put on the page is competing for attentiom with the content which brought the being reading it in the first place.

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