The one thing I hate is to see a website with too many ads on it. Banner ads and popups (including those annoying contextual javascript ads) are the worst. They detract from the website, especially content driven sites like forums and blogs. Here's a good example of a forum with advertising that is certainly not green, and there are many other sites out there like it. This all started in another forum conversation. I was trying to gather some ideas on a concept involving PPC for forum signatures. Someone put forward the case that the last thing he wanted to see was more advertising, as it's already ludicrous, and my idea could be open to a lot of spammy activity (very true). I put forward the reasons for my concept being "green", but it also got me thinking about internet advertising as a whole. Advertising is here to stay, we all know that. But is cluttering up a content-driven site with advertising acceptable? Personally I think not, and all my work on internet advertising tries to take that into account. What about you? What is green? To me, green means natural. There would therefore be more of a focus on things like contextual linking (static html, no fancy popups), since it appears on all sites anyway. I don't mean it should be exclusively be that - but that's the best example, as long as every other word isn't linked. Again, it has to look natural. When you go to a content-driven site, you are looking for content or discussion, not ads. If the ads interfere with surfing the site, it's not really that natural. There is no clear-cut definition of what is natural, but a good start might be to take a web page / script without any advertising on it, and look at what kinds of advertising you can put in it without it looking cluttered, spammy, or ad-orientated. Kind of fits with the whole "green" campaign going on over climate change right now. I'll sound like a raving environmentalist if I'm not careful. I just don't like clutter when I go looking for information. Who does! How green is your on-site advertising?
I don't see your point...it's a lot better if the ads do stand out as ads. There are so many bloggers being paid to post now that even if it looked "natural", most reader's wouldn't know that it was commercial.
I think anything can be bad when it is over done. Just look at your site and see if you can find what people are looking for without searching around all the ads for a few minutes. If it is hard to find what site is about then it is over done.
You can still disclose something and it look natural. I wasn't saying you shouldn't disclose paid posts (I think you should personally). A line at the top of a blog post saying "this is a sponsored post" is just an extra line of text. I just find that with many sites I go to, the entire header or sidebar is cluttered with ads. I find it a bit of a turn off, and was wondering how much attention other webmasters (who monetise sites through some kind of advertising) paid to the view of the average surfer who may also not like to be distracted by many ads. The whole green analogy was over-played I know, but I thought it was a more interesting read that way!
usability, or rather, "looks" may suffer a tad, but as long as the visitors keep returning, and the site keeps growing, I personally don't see an issue as a site owner.
Of course it's acceptable.... IF your audience tolerates it. As long as people expect something for free (whether it's services, information, tools, etc.), there's going to be a very ripe advertising market, and frankly they have no room or right to complain unless they're actively financially supporting the time and effort going into the project. That's all there is to it. Will they like it? No. Will they deal with it? In most cases, yes. You have to understand your audience just like in any other aspect of running a business or website. For example, I have a lot of advertising on my business blog at www.BizAmmo.com but very few ads on my latest blog at www.AboutGreenLiving.com. Two different audiences mean you need two different ad strategies. In business, a lot of ads are acceptable, because that audience is more "immune" to them, and frankly they have the best understanding of the financials of running a business, and why the ads are necessary. They're more likely to accept that if they want quality information and time put in from professionals, that they'll pay for it by having to deal with ad space. On things like more personal blogs, you'll find users much less willing to put up with advertising. The same is true if you're running a site where readers expect complete objectivity and advertising could severely tarnish the trust in the site. Know what you need to earn to keep your site alive and justify the time you need to put in. Know your audience and their habits and limits. Let your ad strategy fall somewhere in between.
Stand out or STAND OUT? It is a balance - I would suggest you don't want your site to look like MySpace. Remember what it was like going from AltaVista to Google back in the 90's?
I don't really get your point. A site has ads to make money. If you have no ads then the site will most probably be of less quality. The more you make from a site, the more you will want to work with it. Also, that site most probably looks over done with ads like I think it is, most probably because it's a GPT type forum.
I hope you aren't suggesting that Myspace isn't profitable or unpopular. And remind me again, who runs the advertising on Myspace? It's accepted for the most part. A lot of webmasters just view things differently.