Website ads on the rise

I am old enough to know life before the internet, and no I am not an old geezer either. I am also old enough to remember the early days as the internet gained popularity and the dot com boom. There were very few advertisements per page, which was probably a good thing considering most of us had very slow dial up modems. It was fairly common for websites not to have any advertisements at all back in the early internet days. Of course it didn’t take long for that to change.

Advertising during TV programing when I was growing up was kind of similar. The number of ads on TV were much shorter and fewer than what they are today. Now you are lucky to watch 10 to 15 minutes of your favorite TV program and then there are 5 to 10 minutes of commercial advertisements. Which can be very annoying at times as well.

I do not have a big problem with advertising on web pages. The site owner needs to make some money and can’t provide everything for free.

When websites or pages are overloaded with ads it can be annoying to various degrees. I don’t know why some sites like to cram as many ads as they can per page. I guess the thought is more ads equals more money, but it can be a real turnoff from the average visitors perspective.

One forum I belong to people are constantly asking if someone can take a look at their website and let them know what we think. Many of them are barely two or three paragraphs with hundreds of ads around them. Well maybe not quite one hundred, but it sure seems like it.

So what is the ideal amount of ads per page and when do they become too much? This is a good question and difficult to answer. When a page starts to load extremely slow as a result of all the ads you probably have too many. If you have more ads than content you probably have too many.

Even if your website and individual pages have lengthy enough content at some point you should probably say enough is enough. I have too many ads already.

Trying to squeeze so many ads on a page can sometimes have negative effects, and turn visitors away. It might be a matter of testing to see what happens and if your stats take a nose dive you might have too many.

If you put more ads on your website and your stats start to look like this, you might have too many:

Like I said I am not against advertising on websites and pages. I have been to a few recently that had an overwhelming amount and I didn’t stick around long. I don’t know how anyone can say they have such a great website when 90% of their site is all ads. But, to each their own and whatever works for you. Just don’t expect people like myself to spend much time there.

It’s not limited to smaller or personal websites either. There are quite a few popular and well-known sites that I would consider a little ad happy. It is possible they have some pretty big expenses they need to cover, but they can be just as annoying too.