Flaws and Solutions With Advertising

The People's Internet team is in support of reasonable and unintrusive usage of advertising to make money for cost-free programs. However, we must note that in many ways it is easy to run into pitfalls with advertising, which can harm the application you are working on. In this article we will cover flaws with advertising, and reasonable solutions to correct these flaws.

Advertising, especially on the internet, is currently in an expanding market that is at risk of "popping" if not well handled. At the moment, the value of ads for the advertiser and the income for the publisher are at a reasonable and balanced value, but this could collapse if the method in which we advertise continues on a negative trend. This negative trend is caused by the misuse of these ads, creating a complete disregard of them by the user (which by itself is merely an issue between the website publisher and user), and causes a devaluation to the advertiser. Ads should ALWAYS be uninstrusive, as the more ads become an annoyance and hinderance to the user, the less value they will have to all involved.

Picture a website a user visits frequently. The website has banner ads, sidebar ads, in-content ads, and any other type of ad that can be crammed into the page. The user visits the website for the content, not the ads. Therefore, with such a high volume of ads, just about every user will disregard them completely. Even though there are many more ads, advertisers would value them quite low (for good reason), and users would not enjoy using the questionably-designed website.

Now, picture this website has a low amount of advertising, and the advertising is fit well into the content in a way that it is still clear to the user it is an advertisement, but does not visually harm the site. Users may give these ads a longer glance, and with the low frequency the advertiser would value the space more. Not only that, but more users in general would stay on the website. Advertising MUST be used in reason, and MUST not affect the user experience in any majorly negative way.

Many advertising companies, including Google, manually review the websites that contain their ads to make sure the contained content has reasonable value. This could also help increase income from legitimate advertisement hosters (not ones with websites in which the main focus is ads). It may be short-term gain to use a high-volume of advertising, but it never works in long term. The user needs to enjoy their experience on your site for the income you are making from advertising not to stagnate.

Additionally, advertising could also have an effect on other parts of the website that may be overseen. Ads could decrease loading speed, or cause other content to malfunction. This is not an issue with the advertising itself, but how it is implemented. One should be careful to make sure the ads do not harm experience in all forms, not just those that would initially be considered. These negative impacts on experience could ripple back to previously mentioned ones, so the best way is to try and test your website thoroughly as a normal user when changing anything regarding advertisements.

In conclusion, advertising could massively harm the experience of your website but could also provide a way to offset operational costs and even make an income from it. The best advice for making decisions regarding including advertising is excerise a lot of caution, and think ahead rather than in the moment.