Hey there, everyone. This evening I began to roll out new native ads onto blog posts. These are banner images that break up the text and direct you to one of three places,
Our Discord server information page.
The invite code for the LBP Union community on the Spaces for Wix app.
The Community Wellness Initiative article (Pathfinder program.)
I am looking for feedback on how these ads appear on the page. I set out to build them with these objectives in mind,
The ads should help break up larger pieces of text to make them easier to read.
Banners should be relatively unobtrusive but pleasing to the eye.
Information presented by the ads should be relevant and helpful to the reader.
Ads usually aren't fun, and your adblocker probably won't stop you from seeing these since they are simple image links. However, my hope is that these banners in particular will be helpful for you and also pleasing to look at. Large blocks of text can be difficult to take on, and breaking them up with images and banners can make reading longer articles easier. Here is an example below from one of our articles about why the LBP servers are still down.
I'm surprised no one has asked me about this yet, but I am on the fence about introducing traditional Google Ads onto this site. It would certainly help me cover the costs of running the website, but I'm not sure that introducing them would be worth it. I also greatly value user satisfaction, and I feel that haphazardly splattering advertising across the website would make coming to this site very annoying. Wix already makes the page load time pretty bad as it is.
What are your thoughts? Do you like the banners? Are they annoying? What could be changed about them to make them more helpful or relevant? Would you be opposed to seeing traditional ads on this site to help support hosting costs?