Finance Blogs and Advertising

At what point does advertising detract from the reader's experience? That's a question I grapple with, both in reviewing other finance blogs and in deciding how many ads to place on my own blogs.

That question once again came to the fore this weekend when I re-visited a personal finance blog. It's now so plastered with ads that the reader's experience has significantly deteriorated. As a result, I removed it from the list of selected personal finance blogs maintained on Sound Money Tips but left an explanation of why it's been removed. (You can find out which one it was by checking The Personal Finance Blog Resource Page.)

Then this: a new investment blog, Eclectic Investment, links to a list of the author's favorite blogs. Among his top 5:

Seeking Alpha: This blog is run by finance professionals and covers many different areas of investment. This blog has lots of useful information including a list of finance blogs. But too many ad-banners give this blog a pimp-like character.

Where to draw the line? Finance blogs will have to generate revenue in order to incentivize authors to devote adequate time to writing and raise the quality of content. (The exception is probably economics blogs, due to the fact that they're written by academics who derive value from reputation and the exchange of ideas.) But too many ads detracts from the reader's experience.

My own decision has been (1) place ads only in the right-hand side bar (below the list of other blogs) and at the end of each post, never at the top of the blog or in the middle of an article where they interrupt the reading flow. (2) Use Google contextual ads, as they are more relevent to the content and sometimes even add value. (3) Allow RSS subscribers to read the entire content of Seeking Alpha, The China Stock Blog and The Internet Stock Blog without having to visit the sites themselves.

Is that the right balance, or do "too many ad-banners give this blog a pimp-like character"? Three questions specifically:

1. Should I cut the number of ads?
2. Would you be prefer to make a donation instead of seeing ads?
3. Should I restrict the RSS feed to only the first 50 words of each post in order to boost the number of page views?

Let me know what you think; you can comment below (ie. on the post, for RSS readers).

Comments

[sueinaustin]

As a professional speaker who concentrates on finance, (www.susanbaughman.com/) I visit numerous sites for information, checking what people think, and just keeping my nose in various threads about money. I believe as a business person ads on blogs are fine - as long as they don't pop up and overwhelm the user. Some pop up even when I have it blocked: those blogs rarely get my usage time (unless they are particularly good).