

Ask HN: When to turn on advertisements? - pxlpshr

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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>Does anyone have an opinion on this?
======
prakash
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.

~~~
tstegart
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.

~~~
pxlpshr
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).

~~~
SwellJoe
_\- 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.

~~~
pxlpshr
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...

------
teuobk
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.

------
jeremytliles
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
_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.

------
matthall28
Start with ads immediately. Just make sure you do them well. Ads can be made
unobtrusive or obnoxious.

------
ideamonk
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]

~~~
ideamonk
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

------
3KWA
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!

------
stcredzero
Turn ads on when they turn you on.

