Way too many times I click on a link to a blog post and must wait while tons of ads, flash embeds, graphics and who knows what else load, maxing out my CPU for an annoyingly long time. I still can’t understand why bloggers do this.

I’ve addressed the problem of page size, but now I want to address the problem of un-monitored ads.

Getting ads on your blogs is hard enough to do to begin with, so I can understand the temptation to let advertisers have their way, but when it drives away readers, you are giving up future ad revenue for current ad revenue, which is, more than likely, a net loss.

My suggestion would be to monitor frequently (several times a day) the behavior of the ads on your site (specifically the individual posts, since that’s where a lot of your traffic will be funneled to from search engines) . See if the load time is acceptable and make sure none of the ads are loading things you didn’t approve (porn, semi-porn, malware, viruses).

Also, leave a link for readers to report abusive ads, since many will send the bad ads only rarely, not enough for you to catch, but enough to run off regular readers. If the reader know he can report the ad, then he may feel better about returning. Notice that Facebook has that feature.

The key here, is to be more than the writer, be the reader, too, and know what they are experiencing.

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