How do you advertise without making it look like your spamming? Is that even possible? Should publishers gives up advertising just give up because they're hurting their website's image? Are images/banners safer to advertise without hurting your site image? If you don't believe me, just take advertisement out for a week and see if the traffic goes up. If it doesn't, then maybe your site probably wasn't very good to begin with...
Spam is not the way you talk about your offer, but the channel you promote it through. If you show your offer to people that are the real target for it without invading their privacy, they will never see it as spam. This i why Inbound Marketing is so much better that "interruption marketing".
What i do a lot on Reddit with my hosting business is to answer their web hosting related question, provide my own service and what i can do to fill their need, as well as give 2 alternative hosting providers that might also fit their needs.
When it comes to advertising - the more the merrier. If you're shy with it you won't make much from it or it won't get noticed. Take TV for instance, it seems like certain advertisers want to show their products every 10 minutes 24/7. People don't quit watching TV because of that. I personally think if your site delivers a quality service and has a great design and content 3 - 4 ads per page won't hurt it. Another thing to remember is people are expecting ads on pages these days. Like my wife says: "If I come to a website and there are no ads I wonder if something's wrong with that site." She's joking of course, but I think good image ads can make a page look "happier".
I think that I get the gist of what you are asking. As was mentioned, most people don't mind seeing a couple of ads on a site as it is so common. What makes me turn and run is if I come to a site and that is all that I see. I have (and you likely have also) been to sites where they have three columns of nothing but ads and banners, with a sprinkling of text in between. I think that if you have a good balance of quality copy and ads (with emphasis on "Quality Copy") then you should have no problem, and people will not be turned away by what you have on your site.
Quality copy? You mean like content that's not unique but is of high quality? Readers might be okay with that but isn't that bad for SEO?
My idea of "Quality" is that it is useful to the reader AND it is as unique as possible. It may not be possible to have everything unique, but at least from my perspective, "Unique" is part of of quality. I usually write as much of my own copy as I can. I can control keywords, content, and everything else. It is time consuming, but worth it. When time becomes an issue (and it often is), I will re-write and use PLR articles. I never just stick them up on my site "AS IS". Most of them are so horribly written that I would not read them if I saw them posted somewhere. It still takes time, but not so much. I also don't use article spinners as they generally do such a poor job that it takes as much time correcting the spun article as it does just doing it myself. As far as SEO goes, I suppose if most of your content is from other sources, and you have little or no original information to show, then it may affect your rank. How much I would not even begin to guess. My main point is that if you keep up with quality (original and informative) content, then you will not only have a better site, but your readership should increase and spend more time reading what you have. With more readers, spending more time, your credibility should increase also. Then, this should also have a positive impact on your SEO. I see no downsides to having excellent content, even if you have ads. Actually, now that I think about it, a site with great content is more likely to be able to capitalize on their ads, because people WILL spend more time on the site and will see the ads more. Therefore, they will be more likely to click on them and maybe purchase.
Well it's unique if it wasn't the resulting of chucking text it into a spinner or paraphrasing someone else's work. That's my opinion of unique (and I think most other people's as well).
Did I say that you should spin your articles? I thought that I stated just the opposite as I spent a few words on how I spend the time to write my own copy. Sorry if I wasn't clear about it. Yes, I do agree with you that paraphrasing and spinning are not quality.
The answer to the OP for me will hopefully be social media, but I agree it's the content that counts and I feel we should all put our own personalities into our content/articles.