Ask HN: When to turn on advertisements? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When to turn on advertisements?

10 pointspxlpshr15 comments

I'm working on a small project with my girlfriend, and it's a free service that we'll support with advertisements. (at least that's the plan)

I don't want to set the expectation that it's a wholly-operated free service, nor do I want to deter early adopters with ad-clutter.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe Digg, Linkedin, and Facebook grew their advertising footprint slowly and over time in respect to their community size.

Does anyone have an opinion on this?

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Turn on ads immediately, that will give you time to play around with the various knobs associated with online ads. Also, you get some idea on how much money you can make from the ads, since that's going to your primary source of revenue for this venture.

Don't worry about ads and early adopters. Most of them have adblock or some variant turned on, the rest probably don't click on the ads anyway.

I agree, build ads into your design. I don't think you need to turn them on right away though, you can fill the space with "internal" ads showing off features or other things you want people to take advantage of, like your RSS feed, your Blog, a "suggestions page" etc. Just format them as display ads, and slowly over time replace them with real ads.

I don't think you ever want to clutter up an interface with ads, but building them in so they look good to begin with is a good idea.

I've most definitely taken ad space into consideration:

- a banner near logo, - a leaderboard under primary navigation - and two squares (300x250) can fit nicely along the right side

Last night I embedded all of the ad blocks into the tpl, and can control each via CSS using display: none.

Does anyone know if this will this render problems with adsense in regard to false impressions? (as oppose to completely removing the code from the template).

- a banner near logo, - a leaderboard under primary navigation - and two squares (300x250) can fit nicely along the right side

Take it easy. While I was going to chime in on the side of "start with ads, because adding them later just pisses people off". But I'm also of the opinion that early stage sites should have minimal ad clutter. Find out what you have to do to make the site pay before you decide to pile them on. One ad spot is probably a good starting point.

You may already be saying you're going to experiment rather than pile them all on at once--but I can't be sure from your comment, so I thought it worth adding.

Absolutely agree with you. All of those ad spaces were taken into consideration but I will not send all 4 ads down the pipeline immediately...

Careful with that!

Displaying the javascript for an ad and then hiding it using CSS is a very bad idea.

a) adds page load time cause the user still has to download and execute the javascript to include the ad before it's hidden.

b) might be considered fraudulent to pull an ad and then hide it.

I highly suggest controlling ad inclusion directly in the tpl file.

Yeah that was my concern, I'll just remove it entirely... Thanks!!

Turn them on as soon as possible. I made the mistake once of waiting a long time (as in years) before turning on ads, and the users were NOT happy campers. They seemed to think that it was their right to have an ad-free site.

Funny, I asked a similar question on another forum recently, and the consensus was something like "don't turn on adsense, it looks spammy." I'm not sure if they were objecting to adsense or ads in general.

I have to say, I was a bit taken aback by this advice. Given the penetration of adsense in this day and age, I hardly think it looks "spammy" unless you throw giant ad units up on all sides of the page.

Anyway, I think you put it in right from the start if you're sure that's your revenue model. Most people are used to seeing ads, especially on content sites that clearly aren't going to charge money. As someone else mentioned, just don't make it obnoxious.

I asked a similar question on another forum recently, and the consensus was something like "don't turn on adsense, it looks spammy."

This merely tells you that the audience at that particular forum are too young to have to pay their own bills, or too 1337 to be worth listening to. If you're building a business website with the only monetization option available being ads, then of course you're going to turn on ads. And AdSense pays better than many options for many sites, so it's the best choice more often than not.

Start with ads immediately. Just make sure you do them well. Ads can be made unobtrusive or obnoxious.

Turn on ads when many people have become loyal to your product. And besides that... the most important part is that put up ads in a way that people don't get bugged by it. Do is slowly and subtly. I used to hate hi5 because they had too many ads and that made the website slow too(on my P3 800 Mhz 196mb ram). It seemed as if hi5 is made of beggars [:P]

And yeah... try experimenting various positions on page to put ads... make colour scheme camouflage with content. do same for the font face size and colour. sometimes put them in the same boxes as content sections... the user sometimes get fooled into thinking that its a content/menu

Not sure I am in a position to give an ADVICE on the matter but the CHOICE I made for my free service is to roll in advertising and affiliation when I have something that add value to the user experience of the service. E.g. I love receiving Amazon's reading recommendations!

Turn ads on when they turn you on.

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