How to Choose Advertising for Your Site, Part 2: Annoyance Factor

By Charlie on July 15th, 2008 | 3

How to Choose Advertising for Your Site

In Part One of our How to Choose Advertisements for Your Site series, we talked about Quality Control of ads and how they mesh with your site. While the ideas in that post go along well toward achieving today’s topic as well, there’s still more to say about it. And that “it” is: how not to piss people off.

Guidelines for selecting advertising for your site

2. Don’t annoy your readers

I think the best way to introduce this one is just to say “trust yourself” and listen to your intuition. If you’re thinking of running an ad on your site, ask yourself, “Is this annoying? Would it annoy me to have this shoved in my face?” If the answer is yes, don’t run it.

Even if the ad is perfectly fine design-wise and has a slick logo, maybe its overall vibe is just…obnoxious for some reason. And if you think it might be, you can be sure that it probably is and that your more discerning visitors will have a hissy. Don’t run it.

I’d love to be able to give you some concrete guidelines for this, but there’s an element of “can’t quite put my finger on it” about this. Your subjective reality is probably far more effective than a list of rules would be anyway.

An ad that fits into this category might just leave you scratching your head. Or saying brilliant stuff like, “I don’t know. It just…sucks.”

Possibly you and the advertiser will have a conversation like this:

You: I can’t run this ad.

Advertiser: Why not?

You: I don’t know.

Advertiser: You’ll have to do better than that. It’s a perfectly fine ad.

You: Why do I hate it then?

Advertiser: Doesn’t matter. I’m the ad-man and I know best.

You: I just get the impression that if I met this ad in person, it would smell like armpits.

The comparisons between ads and odors will only get better in Part 3. Subscribe now and you’ll get it at its pungent best!