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My immediate advice would be to get rid of that little google ad bar that looks like a navigation. It's both confusing and sneaky, even if (maybe?) that was not

My immediate advice would be to get rid of that little google ad bar that looks like a navigation. It's both confusing and sneaky, even if (maybe?) that was not your intent. Other than that, I was completely confused as to what I was looking at until I read your description here in the comments. Sounds like an interesting biz, though I don't know anything about that to comment one way or another!

fallingmeat 14y ago
great points. We're definitely not going to sacrifice usability for the beer money from adsense. Thanks
citricsquid 14y ago
I've never understood the people that put adverts on projects like this. Adverts work at scale. If you have 100,000 people viewing your website every day people are willing to pay good money for access to that audience, if that audience is 100 people the cost of advertising to them is pennies. If someone puts 100 hours into building something like this it's clear they intend on it becoming a legitimate business, this means every single person that visits at initial release is someone that could be a customer or could help the site reach the goals set out by the creator. Anything that can potentially jeopardise this (poor functionality, making it look amateur -- adverts) is pointless. Trading potential success for the advert revenue adsense will bring from a HN post (most posts about the HN traffic bump talk about ~10k page views, so let's say that generates $10 in revenue with a small advert bar) is nonsensical. It'd be better to go and pick pennies up from the street! There was a person that posted their Youtube channel on reddit a few days ago and they wanted people to review it and give them pointers. I decided to check it out, so I clicked to their channel and was made to watch a 30 second pre-roll advert, I decided that 30 seconds wasn't worth it and closed it. The channel could have been amazing; I could have been the person that watched their video and shared it with my network and that could have triggered great things, but because of very silly short term thinking they lost that.
- fallingmeat 14y ago
  I agree. Since this was mainly a usability test, it's good to know how horrible an ad bar will be. The message has been loud and clear so far.

fallingmeat 14y ago

great points. We're definitely not going to sacrifice usability for the beer money from adsense. Thanks

citricsquid 14y ago

I've never understood the people that put adverts on projects like this. Adverts work at scale. If you have 100,000 people viewing your website every day people are willing to pay good money for access to that audience, if that audience is 100 people the cost of advertising to them is pennies. If someone puts 100 hours into building something like this it's clear they intend on it becoming a legitimate business, this means every single person that visits at initial release is someone that could be a customer or could help the site reach the goals set out by the creator. Anything that can potentially jeopardise this (poor functionality, making it look amateur -- adverts) is pointless. Trading potential success for the advert revenue adsense will bring from a HN post (most posts about the HN traffic bump talk about ~10k page views, so let's say that generates $10 in revenue with a small advert bar) is nonsensical. It'd be better to go and pick pennies up from the street! There was a person that posted their Youtube channel on reddit a few days ago and they wanted people to review it and give them pointers. I decided to check it out, so I clicked to their channel and was made to watch a 30 second pre-roll advert, I decided that 30 seconds wasn't worth it and closed it. The channel could have been amazing; I could have been the person that watched their video and shared it with my network and that could have triggered great things, but because of very silly short term thinking they lost that.

fallingmeat 14y ago
I agree. Since this was mainly a usability test, it's good to know how horrible an ad bar will be. The message has been loud and clear so far.