Dear LibDemVoice, Wikio, Met Office, National Rail Enquiries and, well, the whole internet,
I get that you need to make money, or at least pay the hosting bills. I also understand that you probably have limited editorial control over the adverts that get displayed. However, between you all you have just made me install Firefox Adblock, ensuring I am not going to see half your adverts and thus deprive you of potential revenue.
Not that I was likely to click on them in the first place.
Why? Because I move around a fair bit and other than my trusty iPad, the device I am most likely to be reading your sites with is a little HP NetBook. It only has a 1.6GHz processor and 1GB of RAM which whilst was a specification I’d have drooled over a few years ago, is rock bottom for Windows 7. (I’d intended to run Ubuntu, but it came with Windows and 7 is surprisingly usable compared to Vista) I’m not alone in this, not everyone has nice new shiny computers. My mothers computer, for example, is perpetually struggling just to turn on each morning, although I suspect that has more to do with the fact that my kids are let loose on it most weekends.
Do you know what happens when you put flash or some other animated advert on your site? My computer slows down. Quite a few people’s computers slow down. Somewhere, god probably kills a kitten.
Do you know what happens when you put half a dozen such adverts on your site? It’s like trying to navigate through treacle. Your site becomes unusable and I either have to install Adblock or not bother visiting. Multiple gods band together and start the wholesale slaughter of while cities full of kittens.
Flash hurts!
If websites offered to get rid of adverts for people who donated a small amount of money, how much would you be willing to donate?
For websites I use frequently I would certainly be willing to pay a few pounds for faster loading and no irritating, flashing banners. Is this a revenue source that websites are ignoring, or am I just unusual?
Doing it for individual web sites I think would ensure that I simply couldn’t be bothered – for example, if I’m on National Rail Enquiries I’m generally in enough of a hurry not to be bothered with that sort of thing. The money that a web sites makes in advertising per visitor is also small enough that the cost of handling the transaction would probably far exceed the money they’d make.
However, there are fewer advertising networks out there – I could see my paying a quid or two a month to each of them to turn off adverts, but I’m not sure how they’d then pay the sites in question given it’s typically pay-per-click not pay-per-view these days.
Hey there this is somewhat of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or
if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding expertise so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!