As someone who monetises their websites with advertisements, I personally believe that there are too many ads on the Internet, especially on sites that are linked to by Facebook pages. Hell, even right now you’re probably staring at 1-4 ads on this website! But then that begs the question: if I think there are too many ads online, why would I “ad” (pun) to the problem in the first place? Well, let me tell you a bit about the types of ads and how much is too much.

The 2 Types of Ads: Intrusive & Non-Intrusive

Intrusive Ads

Intrusive ads are the ones that pop-up and interrupt the actions of your site visitors. These ads are usually in the form on interstitial advertisements. Below, I’ve embedded a post from Google+ by Dan Petrovic about his ad-related issue while visiting the website QuickSprout, which is the site in the image above. He details the exact problem with intrusive ads in his Google+ post below.

How to lose audience in three easy steps
After three pop-ups I decided that whatever the article was about, can’t be worth it and closed the tab. Here’s what happened…

Pop-up #1: Close [x] button is hidden at the start encouraging you to click on “Yes” or “No” choices. That’s not as bad as the text under the “No” saying “I have enough traffic”. See here’s the thing, even if “enough traffic” statement made any sense, I still wasn’t going to click on “Yes” button because I was there to read a specific article. Also, in the rest of the copy I see terms such as “Monster Traffic Generation”.

Pop-up #2: Right after dismissing the first ad, another pops up promising me double conversion rate if I give them my email. Clicking “No Thanks, Conversion Rate is not important to me.” felt wrong because CRO is important to me. The site is making me feel like an idiot now.

Pop-up #3: That was it for me. I had an instant dislike for the site and its “floodgates of profitable traffic”. If this is what they do on their own website then there’s nothing that I want to read on it.

Non-Intrusive Ads

Non-intrusive ads are ads that appear either in-between paragraphs or somewhere else on the page. They don’t obstruct your view of the content you’re reading, viewing, or watching, although in some cases they may be distracting.

How Much Is Too Much?

In my opinion, the following situations constitutes as “too much” as far as ads are concerned:

• If the page is slow to load. While I like the forum Benzworld, 15+ ads on each page causes the forum to run slow, so this is a great example of too many ads.
• If the website is downright unusable. Click on almost any Facebook ad for an example.
• If the ads are too distracting or take away from the content.
• If the ads prevent users from interacting with the page the way they want to (e.g., clicking causes a pop-up).
• If the ads obscure content. I actually have an article here about ads that obscure content.