Losing Your Users
By Rob Safuto on Nov 22, 2007 in Advertising | Tags: Adsense , Advertising , monetization
Good post yesterday by Seth Godin titled, Thanks. Seth makes a very salient point in his post when he writes, “Every time you read something I write here, you’re giving me a gift… attention.”
Seth writes this in the context of whether or not he should have ads or sponsorships on his blog. Should you have sponsorships or random link ads on your site? Do you want your site visitors to go away?
Every time I go to a new Web2.0 service and see those Adsense or Adbrite ads I think, “They’re happy to see me go away.” The same with blogs that have these types of ads. The writers of those blogs want me to click on those links and go away. Why would you put them there otherwise?
For some sites having random links show up makes sense. There must be some people who make really good money from it. Those same people must also have great content that has people coming back regardless of the distractions. Ditto for paid sponsorships, which I think are generally more relevant than those wild random links that sometimes even show links to competing services.
Its not only independent bloggers and Web2.o startups that are in love with sending people away. Sony Records frequently develops sites for their artists (like Ozzy Osbourne and Kelly Clarkson) that include Adsense links and banner ads. I guess they would rather that visitors to artist sites spend their time and money elsewhere.
I think that anyone who is trying to grow their audience or grow users to their service should use their precious website space to keep people on the site, not send them elsewhere.
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