I’m not convinced that ads on forums work.
If you are a regular user of a bulletin board or forum you tend to focus on the content and not the adverts. However if the ads are truly eyecatching then you maybe attracted to them.
Forums by their nature produce thousands if not millions of pages with plenty of text to provide context. If you can get relevant ads displaying on the pages and your audience to see them, then you should, in theory at least, be able to garner some revenue from them
Most forums, regardless of the software being used, are very conservative with their placement of media. Standard 468 x 60 ads in the header and footer would seem to be the norm.
If you stick to the norm then maybe you shouldn’t complain about banner blindness.
So where should you be putting the ads?
According to the Adsense blog:”Problogger”:http://www.problogger.net/ a skyscraper on the left of the page is the ~”hottest” spot
They’ve provided another one of those “hot spot” maps to make it easier:
Needless to say the same would apply to non-adsense advertising
One of the tricks I’ve noticed is to place ads in the middle of the forum posts ie. between one post and another. Whether this leads to higher click rates or not is a different story, but it definitely caught my attention
Adsense on Fora – Maximising revenue
But ads between posts would really annoy me. I’d hate to have to keep scrolling past ads, so I’d just install ad blocking software.
You can only have 3 adsense blocks per page, so I can’t see how it would be that obtrusive
I just hate having things interrupt the flow of my reading – I also dislike articles with ads in the middle.
However if it’s only a max of 3 it’s probably not too bad – I tend to have fora I read set to display 40 posts per page if possible.
There are a couple of places I’ve seen that do it well with one or two adsense blocks appearing per page in between posts. I don’t find it obtrusive, but I would see why you’d find it annoying if there were more ads than anything else on the page 🙂
Commented on this idea here:
http://www.mulley.net/archives/000678.html
Damien
I saw. I don’t agree with you though. There is a nice little hack for vbulletin that puts in one clearly labelled adblock after post #1 in a thread. If the adsense ads were being displayed as if they were part of the posts ie. tricking users it would be disruptive
I think that banner blindness will kill google. People stop clicking and advertisers will go to a new format.
Our new forums are going to have ads and reading this article is helpful. Our forums are at http://www.notd-aftermath.com/hq