Ads Don't Belong on Your Business Site

Back in the late 90s there was a range of free website hosting options - GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod are the big 3 I remember straight off the top of my head. The business model was pretty simple, you got a free site, albeit with a bad URL, and the host got to inject ads into the page. The first “site” ever I ever built was hosted by tripod and is still up, I have forgotten the login details so it hasn’t been updated for years.

Of the 3 stars of this business model, angelfire and tripod are still offering an ad supported version along with ad free, fee for service upgrades, but geocities is dead. Today, the business model has evolved, you can get a free but ad supported blogs (see Blogger.com or wordpress.com), email services (see gMail, Yahoo or Microsoft) or project hosting (see sourceforge, xp-dev or CodePlex) along with many other online services. For personal stuff I think this is fine, and the same goes for small not for profit organisations. On the other hand if you run a business and want to appear professional, profitable and “up with technology”, then you don’t want your email address to be acme234789@hotmail.com, or your website to be acme-inc.freehostingco.com. It could be worse, you could be using an email address or hosting supplied by your ISP such as sxcsteve@bigpond.com and myisp.com.au/acme-inc. In the case of email, you can use Google Apps for Domains Google Workspaces and still look professional.

It is different if you are solely providing free (as in beer) content, such as video, news or a professional blog. This is a clear business model, fund free content via advertising, it has been used by print news, radio and television for decades. I also think it is fine for community based free/open source software projects to use it to get some additional revenue. It is different if you are a profit making business.

Not only does running ads on your site look unprofessional, you could be promoting the competition. Google targets their ads based on the content of the page. For example if you are a small shop and you have a page listing the types of products you offer, Google is likely to serve up ads on that page for those products. Do you really want an ad from a competitor showing up with “Cheap [item], free next day delivery”? How many high value paying customers will you lose for that extra few dollars a month in Ad Sense revenue?

I find it more shocking on large corporate sites. Yes, they attract a lot of eye balls, but I pay my phone company enough money and they make large enough profits, that I shouldn’t have to be subjected to ads on their corporate home page. It makes them look cheap. The same goes for smaller businesses.

In the case of a business blog, it should be part of your business website. If people find your blog and they like what they see, they are likely to click around your site to find out more about you. If you have your blog on blogger they are only likely to find other blog posts, and if you have a link to your business website, they will probably stop clicking once they hit your business site as it is completely different from your blog. If on the other hand it’s all nicely integrated, your readers are able to move from your blog posts to your business content seamlessly - and so are more likely to become a customer, rather than another bounced visitor.

What are your options? Many hosts offer one click installers for setting up drupal, wordpress or other content management systems. With a bit of help from an online tutorial or 2 you should be able to get drupal up and running with a basic site and a theme from contrib. Sure it will look a bit cheap, but no worse than something on blogger. If you were to host it with dreamhost it is going to cost you around 120USD a year. Even if you have to pay someone to help you setup your CMS site, it will probably cost you less than 500USD in the first year for a basic setup. A basic setup will allow your business to project a professional image to the world. Add a professionally designed custom theme and site build for another 1850USD/2000AUD or so and you are set for a few years. Of course you will spend more if you want some to help with designing your information architecture, help with SEO, produce or proof content or suggest images etc. The investment is likely to pay for itself over that time in increased sales.