Right now my page only has one well placed adsense ad but in the future as I get more traffic I'm thinking about using adsense and maybe two other services to advertise. When I add them I'm wondering if I should add them all at once or slowly keep adding them until I have all of them up. My concern is I will tick some people off with the ads but I'm sure there's a nice way to handle it so people understand you need some income for providing a good service. How did you guys handle adding more ad space? I'm gonna make sure the page isn't overcrowded with ads and is still a beautiful page to look at so that won't be an issue. Thanks in advance
Well I am by no means an expert, but in my experience the majority of your clicks come from new visitors. Return visitors who you are worried about ticking off so you want to gradually easy them into more ads will rarely be clicking on ads anyway. I think you already have the right attitude going in that you aren't going to make your page overcrowded and you will make sure that the page still looks great. Just do that and it is unlikely you are going to make any regular user really ticked off while the extra ads placed well should increase your clicks per page. For myself I find that I'm always tweaking and re-designing and replacing my layout and ads. Until you have a large established following I believe you have the freedom to try out just about anything.
Bear in mind Google's TOS re: other ad networks. In particular they don't want other contextual ads on your page.
Ads that try to match the context of the page. Google's Adsense is contextual so eg. if you have a site about cars you will get ads for car rental, garages, etc.
Hi froghat, roseplant is offering sound advice. Unless you're planning on adding some type of non-contextual ads (e.g. affiliate links, banner ads, etc.), you may be better off just increasing the number of AdSense blocks on each page. You'd probably be well-served to carefully read the AdSense ToS, as well - much easier, in the long run, than doing something that ends up getting you banned... Sam
This is the SAME thing all webmasters think about when they start adding advertising to their sites. "Will this piss off my visitors?" As someone who has been there, here's my experience: Oh sure, the regulars will bitch and moan (mostly on your board), but they won't go anywhere. My theory is this: if they "care" enough to whine, then they like the place enough to stay. Trust me on this: as long as the ads aren't, say, loading spyware or popping up 50 pop-ups at a time on them, no one will go anywhere. Ads are just accepted as part of running a site nowadays.