Nonpartisan political forums. Political blogs. International news.

Sheesh, what an assault!

The fact that such a popular site has such an arrangement seems to indicate that people accept that. This could indicate that I'm wrong and exaggerate the problem. Or maybe the users at DailyKos are highly motivated, and feel that it's worth enduring for the good cause.

Even so, I think that in the long run you get far more ad clicks and sales if you have only very few ads displayed on each page, but many different to cycle. More on this in another comment.

(and K5 when you're not logged in)?

On the K5 frontpage, I think the arrangement is ugly. On story pages, I prefer the way your story pages looked when your layout was similar. Your story pages were a little more elegant.

But I prefer a straight left margin, with the story text not wrapping around the box.

I still think it would be a good idea to put a box that lists the frontpage stories in the left margin, below the intro, beside the story's text body. And I think this will look best if the body text has a straight margin that doesn't wrap around the box.

The left and right margins could very well contain boxes that reach roughly equally far down.

-- it uses the topic and section to generate books that may be related. I was going to change it to also use the title,

Sending the title's words as keywords may be a very good idea.

However, often this ad doesn't show me any books, just a little cellphone and a list of product categories. Is this different for you? (It could be related to visitor's country, though I doubt it.)

I think this happens in most sections except International. This could indicate that this appears when Amazon's server can't parse your string. This may mean that some separator is needed in the list of keywords. Maybe rather than "Business & Finance United States of America" it should say, for example, "Business; Finance; United States of America", or some such.

If this is the case, then sending the entire story title will not help, it has to be divided into keywords.

There's another important syntax error in the string. You have to "escape" the string, whatever that is called in Perl. Space characters must be replaced with the sequence %20, and lots of other characters have to be replaced too. Whether the separator between keywords (if any) should be escaped or not depends on what Amazon has decided. It may be important to get it right.

Mind you, I still don't have money to spend. Bit I certainly don't have enough money or time to just cough up cash for every book who's ad hits my eyeballs.

Have book reviews 'intelligently' attached to some of your main entries, and then attach the book ads to the reviews. Maybe you can do something like that. Maybe you can't. I only know that I very much look forward to reading the book review section of my ISR.

And finally, Content is important. Great looking ads for items that savvy readers know, or suspect, don't contain great content, are never going to fly. Then again, The content comes from it's providers. You've either got a 'product' you can sell, or you don't. If you are rightwing, for example, and if most of your visitors are rightwing, then to me, your content (the ads you display, if you have some say about that), will be useless.

I haven't misunderstood your site's mission, by the way. I myself would have phrased it differently, but I agree with it. The 'site' isn't Left or Right or anything specific. But the people coming here do have specific views and so forth, and if you suggest that they can't have those specific views then you'll also be suggesting that no one is welcome. And I already know that that's not true.      

;-)

Thus, I think the spot at the top of the right-margin column should show a different type each time you fetch a page: Sometimes a Google ad, sometimes a book ad, sometimes a blogad, and so on. When the ads are small there can be several of them at the same time. The total space that they occupy should normally not exceed the space occupied by your bestseller ad.

Similarly, the spot between story and discussion should cycle through all types of ads.

My reasoning here is the following. Suppose you have a total of 25 ads to show your readers, and in a few days a reader looks at 25 pages. If all the pages contain all your ads, the reader will feel that it's too much, reading them all would take too long, so he just ignores almost all your ads. If instead your 25 ads are shown one at a time, a single ad on each page, he'll feel that it's just a tiny amount to read, so it doesn't matter, he can read it.

And since it's new every time he may also be curious.

So what's the best amount of ad material per page? It seems to me that one ad to the right and one below the story is the arrangement that will give the most clicks and sales in the long run.

With this arrangement you get lots of variation, which helps call attention to the ads, and it keeps down the visitor's reading cost. The visitor pays a price for every ad he reads. It's not a price in money, it's a price in time, the time to read. It's also a price in tiredness -- tiredness from information overload and tiredness from shifting attention. The lower you keep this cost, the larger the number of people who will accept the cost and read the ads.

When people pay a price they want something in return. If reading your ads is rewarding enough to compensate the cost, people will keep reading your ads. If it isn't, they'll stop. It's that simple.

If the cost is quite small, the reward can also be quite small and still be acceptable. Even then it's quite difficult to make ads sufficiently interesting, entertaining, beautiful etc to give the reader a sufficient reward.

If you reduce the time-cost by half, maybe ten times more people will accept the cost. In that case, although in theory you're halving the chances per page for each reader, you get ten times as many people reading the ads, so in total you get at least a fivefold increase in clicks and sales.

It would be nice if we could find the best amount of ads per page by checking statistics. Unfortunately this is quite difficult and tends to be misleading. By increasing the amount of ads you will usually get a very notable increase in clicks -- in the short term. But in the long term (which unfortunately means several months ahead) people will be far more resistant to all your ads, simply because nobody has time to read so many ads all the time. You've made the cost too high and people have stopped noticing your ads. If you then decrease the amount of ads, it takes even longer before people change their habits and start reading your ads again.

Having spoken so much about this, maybe I should mention that I'm no professional in the field. But I've always found the psychology of advertising interesting, and I've become very interested lately. I'm pretty sure this is the way website advertising will go as the field matures. I also think the ads and commercials in other media, where the field has matured, confirm my views quite clearly. But still I can't base my statements on any professional experience, or statistics, or other hard facts. It's all just analysis and thought, combined with an intuition about people's feelings that is usually very accurate, but can and does occasionally go wrong.

There is another spot for ads. When there are ten or more comments there should be a third ad spot below all the comments, again cycling through all the ad types. That spot may get less attention than others, but still, not having an ad there seems to me a waste of good ad space. That's because you can safely put an ad there without negative effect. And after reading a lot of comments the reader may very well be in the mood for another ad.

Considering that Google ads have been successful on this site, maybe they should appear more often than other ad types.

I think it would be great if you had all these very different types of ads cycling at the three spots. Readers would never know what to expect! This would really help call attention to the ads.

If a significant proportion of the ads are also really on-topic, on-target, interesting to many readers, this arrangement may keep reader's interest in the ads alive over time.

This doesn't surprise me at all. Google has good solutions for targeting ads, so that often the ads are interesting to the people who are interested in the story.

I think this is one of the most important factors when you display ads: Display them to people who are actually interested, not to any random passer-by. After all, if you have, say, a guitar that you want to sell, you don't just walk out on the street and offer it to everyone who just happens to pass by. The chance of bumping into someone who's looking for a guitar that way isn't very high.

Our solution for Amazon simply isn't good enough yet. But I get the impression that we'll get there.

I don't consider it wasted. I think those phrases contribute to defining the site and to the site's atmosphere. Some of those phrases express a lot of hope and optimism for the future of the site. Everyone has a thirst for hope and optimism, everyone wants to see some now and then. Hope and optimism are beautiful things that enrich people's life. It's like a smile up there.

By the way, in the same vein I love how, inside the box for the below-story ad, as a placeholder for future ads, you've written "Coming soon!" It's wonderful. Many people hate ads. On some websites you have to struggle to filter out a barrage of overly obtrusive ads to get at the contents. And here you go presenting future ads with a happily promising exclamation mark! You present the ads that so many hate as a special treat, something everyone will find worth waiting for, something really nice -- Coming soon!

This radiates strong optimism. It's beautiful.

Banner ads could go there, but is that too many ads then?

Yes, too many in my view, and the site logo is a spot that belongs to the WF. With an ad right there at the site's logo, the site would feel colder.

I think the arrangement at DailyKos is a mistake. When discussions get deeply nested, the most deeply nested comments push the right column aside, outside the screen.

And,
what's
worse,
the most
deeply
nested
comments
-- the
ones that
push the
right
column
aside --
also get
squashed
to the
width of
the
longest
word.
They look
quite
weird.
You can't
really
read them
like
ordinary
text. In
fact they
can
become
quite
difficult
to read.

I could try to change the story template to use divs instead of tables

It seems to me that divs would be a good idea anyway.

Ummm, you say "try" -- I've been doing HTML and CSS forever, for me such things are routine. And I love adjusting page designs, I find it relaxing and enjoyable. So if you'd like my help with HTML and CSS, just tell me, and then you can concentrate on other things.