A matter of milliseconds! I was about to write the same thing. I presume this is a lesson taken from that eyetracking video Seth Godin put on his blog. I agree that it was interesting, but, hey, let's not take the whole thing too far. Google ads can't be *the very first thing* people see when they visit a lens, it gives a very, very discouraging impression of sellout...

Oh, no way! The ads make the page uninteresting! I don't think people will be likely to stay on the page very long with that at the top.

Angela

Last edited by AngelaHarms (06/02/2006 8:26 am)

Ok, what if they were under the introduction? That way we'd at least have a chance to
"sell" the page before they got bombed.

Well... Certainly better than under the intro :-)

Last edited by wuming1 (06/02/2006 8:47 am)

OK - well I posted on the other thread before I saw this one but I want to be included in the mix. Please put the ads back on the side. I hate having them at the top - it's very tacky. If the ad is the first thing a reader sees I don't feel interested in making any more lenses. It feels too commercial then. Barrie

Wu Ming - Thanks for the grounding post. You're right, Squidoo staff are very responsive to feedback from lensmasters as far as I can see. Barrie

Another point against the new placement -- One of the reasons google ads took off so fast is that they were acceptable to people who were turned off by the old banner ads. The google ads were easy to place, easy to read, but not obnoxious. By incorporating the ads into the Squidoo design, specifically the large orange lettering, and increasing their size, they've moved closer to the old model of advertising. They dominate the page and force readers to start scrolling before they even have a good idea of what the page is about.

Heath, you said that you're exploring ways for lensmasters to earn more money. And I know that Squidoo has to have income to survive, but please consider that many of us may have jumped at the chance to earn money without alienating our readers.

1. I understand that squidoo staff want us lensmasters (and themselves) to gain more royalties, that couldn't make more sense and I appreciate. However, if the first glance annoys visitors and they don't scroll down the page, there won't be any royalties at all.

2. My humble opinion is that affiliation programs (the moneymaking modules), and not google ads, should be a Squidoo lensmaster's core business. People are getting fed up of google ads and the likes, because they're everywhere and, as Catana noticed, they're beginning to get as obnoxious as old web 1.0 banners were. Moreover, affiliation programs really rely on the lensmaster's intelligence and expertise, while google ads don't.

3. Catana, you wrote that "not all Google ads are even appropriate to the lenses that they're on". I couldn't agree more! The ones on my lenses are ridiculous, none of the people interested in my content would ever click on those things, which indeed damage my credibility.
I'm working hard to describe the corruption and match-fixing in Italian soccer, and here's a google ad in clumsy Italian wanting me to download ringtones with dumb soccer chants, cheering on the very teams that are involved in Soccergate! Come on, this is ludicrous. I think I'll add such tags as "crime", "serial killers", "manslaughter", "rapist", "strangler" etc., so the ads will get more interesting and in topic :-)

4. Jokes apart, it's a depressing thing to see, and I hope that it doesn't last long.

Last edited by wuming1 (06/02/2006 2:17 pm)

Catana

I have several adult lenses. 

Interestingly, three of them have NO Google ads appearing on them, and in that box is just the single word "undefined." 

And the one adult lens that has actual ads appearing on it has one which is for Tribal Carpets.

Man, that has got to be the dumbest thing I've seen all day.  I'd really appreciate if someone could tell me why a rope bondage lens is pulling an ad for carpets....  Guess I should "adult it up more" to lose that nonsense.