Good one, Jacques (assuming you're reading this) People get caught up in all this ranting about MFA sites and they forget one important point: an ad is just an

Good one, Jacques (assuming you're reading this) People get caught up in all this ranting about MFA sites and they forget one important point: an ad is just another link as a resource that you can choose or not to put inside your content. If I'm reading an article on how to carve pumpkins for Halloween, why wouldn't I want a chance to click over and see how much carving kits are at PumpkinCo? In fact, the author of the piece can make a guess as to what I might like, put some links in, then check to see if anybody is clicking them. In this way the ad is much more than a revenue generator: it's helping the content author determine what the intent of his readers are when viewing his site. If I find that nobody clicks on PumpkinCo but lots of folks click on a knife shop, then I can eliminate the PumpkinCo ads, put in knife ads, and, more importantly, think about writing some more content around how to best choose a knife. After all, that's what people visiting the page are interested in. Each little change I make isn't so much focused on income as it is making the perfect experience for the person visiting my page. Too often we think of web pages as something "we do" to the reader, as if it's some huge program that we create and the users are just little bits running around in it. (I know Jacques doesn't think this way, but some folks do). It's better to think of any sort of web content as a conversation: you do something, people come by, you measure and observe, then you respond to what they want. This is the very essence of A/B testing (which talks about this is purely analytical terms) It's a damn-frustrating conversation, but in a way it's a hell of a lot cooler than email or IM. I can take a page over time and hone my message, adjust the graphics, add in ads, mix-in video, maybe add some interactivity -- all in an effort to create an extended multimedia conversation with some guy I will never meet and who may visit my site long after my death. To me that's pretty cool stuff.