Member Avatar for >shadow<

I am looking to place some contextual ads on my site (ones where when you hover over a certain word, they show an ad)
Do you think this will put members and potential members off?
And is it worth the money, do you make much off contextual ads?
I am using AdBrite

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Dani AI

Generated

A few practical points and a short plan to get useful answers instead of guessing.

Hover-triggered contextual ads are a user-experience tradeoff: some members tolerate or even click them, others find them distracting. Instead of deciding by gut, run a small, measurable experiment on a low-risk area of the forum and use the results to decide site-wide. Key things to measure are membership conversion, pages-per-session, session duration, bounce rate and the ads' click-through/revenue (RPM). Track those for control and test groups for a minimum of two weeks or until you have statistically useful traffic.

Implementation checklist that avoids upsetting regulars:

  • Let registered members persist a preference server-side so their choice survives browsers and devices.
  • Gate the ad injection behind a feature flag or template variable so you can enable/disable by group, forum section, or percentage of traffic.
  • Make the inline elements accessible and non-blocking on mobile (keyboard focusable, ARIA labels, no layout shifts).
    Example server-gate (pseudo-PHP) and client hook:
/* server-side */
$show_inline = !$currentUser || !$currentUser->pref->disable_inline_ads;

/* template */
<?php if ($show_inline): ?>
  <span class="ctx-inline">term</span>
<?php endif; ?>

/* client */
if (!showInlineFromServer) document.documentElement.classList.add('no-inline-ads');

Legal and UX cautions: modern privacy rules require clear notices for tracking/storage used by ad scripts — follow your local guidance. For implementation details and regulatory context see the ICO cookie guidance (https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-and-similar-technologies/) and the Better Ads recommendations (https://www.betterads.org/).

This thread already includes useful user-level feedback from , , , , and . Use their views to decide which user segments should get opt-out controls first, then validate the decision with the experiment above before rolling out site-wide.

Recommended Answers

All 10 Replies

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Can't speak for others but those kind of ads don't bother me at all and I'll occasionally click on one to see what its about. I don't have any clues about your other questions.

Member Avatar for Dani

They used to do a lot better than they're doing right now, revenue wise. What we do here is allow registered members to disable them if they want.

Member Avatar for >shadow<

ahh I see, that will be fun trying to figure out on an invision board :D

Member Avatar for Dani

I'm not sure, but I think they offer a feature that lets visitors disable them based on a cookie.

Of course, that's different than what we do here.

Member Avatar for >shadow<

what would you recommend as a network to display contextual ads?

Member Avatar for Dani

For in-text advertising, there's ...

www.vibrantmedia.com

Those are the big three, and they're usually pretty good about negotiating good rates for an exclusive contract when you pit one against the other :)

Member Avatar for lajocar

I use kontera and they are good

Member Avatar for Ash B

I don't mind contextual ads. If the ads are not too obvious or in the way of things. Just don't allow it to take up to much page real estate and try to blend them into the site as much as possible.

Here are some things to avoid,

- Pop up ads, never use these. Ever.

- Ads that are too large.

- Ads that flash, animate or try to attract your attention.


If I like the site I am visiting I have no problem with them making some revenue with advertisements.

Member Avatar for >shadow<

yes Ash B is on the same page as me - pop ups are intrusive and make the page slow because there are hardly any people without a blocker
flashing as or "click this its really scary" ads are annoying
and large ads are just plain ridiculous

Member Avatar for gdi

to be honest, i am not annoyed from contextual ads in any blog or forum i visit... if i like the content i clik on ads, its a kind of tip for the author or the owner of the website :)

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