I was visiting another blog this evening and noticed how little actual blog post content was displaying “above the fold” (what you see without scrolling your browser window down). I don’t want to say which blog, so I took a screenshot and overlayed it with these colors; yellow is header information such as the logo and nav menus, green is content for that blog post, and red is advertisements.
What do you think, too many ads?
About Paul Cunningham
Yep, that’s a lot of ads! I’d also guess that their article had a graphic in it too to “break up the text” and improve scanning of content?! No wonder banner blindness is so prevalent in usability testing – just too much screen real estate is taken up with stuff that we just block out.
As a reader, I certainly hate it when I have to scroll to get any content. Esp as many sites that have a lot of ads take a long time to load them (and to become scrollable).
As to whether it’s effective from a revenue perspective, I can’t say, because I don’t advertise on my blog.
Nice overlay though. Very telling!