The ad tightrope: Balancing content and ads

Monetization can be a great way for independent publishers to earn revenue from their content. With so many site owners spending their time (and sometimes money) on building organic communities, breaking big news, or delivering data to their audiences, monetization helps offset some of the cost of running a website. However, the golden goose of any site is its community, whether they be readers, posters, contributors, or just users. If a site monetizes and doesn’t listen to its community around monetization, it could lose some of its viewership.

So, how can you avoid this as a site owner? We’ll provide a few insights we’ve gathered from site owners and advertisers alike to help you achieve the perfect content and ad balance.

Quality over quantity, always

This may seem like a no-brainer, but don’t drown your site in ads! While it may sound strange coming from an ad network, putting too many ads on your site page may have adverse effects on your readership and user base. It can make your content difficult to read, or functions on your site can become inaccessible, not to mention slower loading times across sites that are bogged down with too many ads.

Less is more when it comes to advertising, which is why we recommend a few high impact ad formats that exist in harmony with your formatting and content. You can check out more of our ad formats on offer to sites within the Collective here.

Building branded ads to suit your audience

For the time being, third party cookies are here to stay. That doesn’t mean they’ll be here forever, which means that more advertisers are relying on first-party and zero-party data to target users with advertising.

This means that in the near future, the programmatic advertisements that populate on your page may become less relevant to your audience. Studies have shown that users are more favorable towards advertising that is relevant to their interests or beliefs, so it’s in your best interest as a site owner to keep your ads relevant.

Ad networks that offer bespoke programmatic packages (like us!) can offer advertisers better rates and a more receptive audience, which in turn means the ad content is of interest to your users. Let’s use the Collective as an example. With over 150 gaming and entertainment sites, we can offer a large audience of casual and hardcore gamers to developers and studios.

Walking the tightrope

When deciding to serve ads to your audience, three things need to be taken into consideration. The placement of your ads on the page, the sheer quantity of advertisements, and the content of the ads being displayed. While it’s more difficult to control the third aspect of the ad tightrope, it’s much easier to control what ads your users are seeing through an ad network.

If you’re after really cool, relevant ads for your audience (like this campaign we did for Apex Legends S22), reach out to our Network team here.