Ad limits - what stops webmasters?

[PornoSatan]

What's stopping someone (other than driving traffic away) from just creating a site and loading it up with like 40 different ad affiliate networks? From what I understand, a few networks don't like it if you're running ads from other networks on your site, but other than that, is it just a matter of taste? What happened to all the web 1.0 type sites that have like a thousand different ads, popups, popunders and so on when you go to their page? Does it have to do with a change of terms of service between the webmaster and the ad network or something else?

I'm asking this purely from a curiousity standpoint. I know that having that many ads would drive traffic away, but I was curious regardless.

 

[Grentz]

Because those sites sucked and visitors went down. Without visitors, the ads are pointless.

and quite frankly there are still plenty of sites with a metric shit ton of ads.

 

[Red Squirrel]

There's quite a few of them out there especially news type sites or how to sites when you are doing a google search for stuff, you can land on some pretty brutal ones. Worse is those javascript overlay type popups that arn't actually real popups, so popup blockers don't block them. At least most of them are nice enough to put a X, but sometimes I wonder if it's a trick, and it's actually going to load some spyware on my PC, then again I'm on Linux so I should be safe and they would not wait till you click the X to load it, they'll just do it with the rest of the page, if they want to do that.

What's insane is Tripod sites, not that those are really popular nowdays, but for shits and giggles I checked one of my super old sites and it's actually still up, there was a ton of popups that somehow made it through the blocker (that just pisses me right off) and tons of overlay ads and banners. Basically the site was pretty much buried in ads beyond being readable. From the few 100 hits per day these type of sites may get from random google searches they probably make their money.

Know what REALLY pisses me off? Pages to download something, and the whole download page is littered with fake download buttons that are actually ads, and you have to try to locate a 10px font REAL download link. No wonder so many people get spyware. If those come even remotely close at tricking me, I'm sure they trick lot of people.

 

[Sgraffite]

It adds maintenance too. Think of when [H] has malicious ads come through, I imagine Kyle or somebody has to report them and such.

 

[PornoSatan]

But I mean, assuming none of the ad networks cared, could one simply make a site and have it be nothing but ads. Like row after row of ads? That's what im talking about. Minimal content, but have like hundreds of ads on the page. I've never seen a site like it so I assume there's a reason they don't exist or never have existed. What's stopping someone from just literally filling their site with dozens and dozens of ads per page? Yes it would slow the site down, yes nobody would want to visit it, but could they even exist or is there some advertising 'law' or 'rule' im missing.

 

[PornoSatan]

For example, lets take Adsense. Adsense only allows 3 ads from them per page. That's fine. So you put 3 adsense ads. Now you move on to the next network and put such and such # of ads, then you move on to the next ad network and do the same, you do this with dozens of ad networks. Is it in theory possible?

 

[PornoSatan]

OK, just so we're on the same page, what is stopping Kyle from putting like 40 ad banners on the top of the forum. Yeah everyone would go crazy, yeah the site would be crazy slow, but is he even ALLOWED to if he wanted is my question? Or maybe there would be some sort of ad affiliate conflict?

 

[krogen]

Nobody wants to annoy the end user. If ads get in the way you will lose viewers, potentially permanently. No viewers, no money. If [H] had ads everywhere I'd find a different forum. I bet mostly everyone would do the same.

There used to be websites, back during the wild west age of web (not long ago...), that were packed with keywords and ads. Some of them made a little bit of money but search engines cracked down on behavior like that.

I still see content stuffers high up in the rankings with somewhat legitemate content. Big example are StackOverflow-like sites that built on top mailing lists. These tend to have a lot of ads as that's what their primary purpose is.

 

[The Donut]

OK, just so we're on the same page, what is stopping Kyle from putting like 40 ad banners on the top of the forum. Yeah everyone would go crazy, yeah the site would be crazy slow, but is he even ALLOWED to if he wanted is my question? Or maybe there would be some sort of ad affiliate conflict?

To actually answer your question:

No. Most ad networks (Google, for instance) have a limit on how many you're even allowed to place on a page. You might get away with it for a little while, but they're pretty clever and one day you'll find your account either locked or empty.

You could mix and match ad networks - but once your site starts looking like an ad-heaven the chance of visitors clicking your ads becomes slim and you lose those that used to perhaps click on the one or two you had.

 

[Ur_Mom]

You could do it, but then you'd have to find a way to drive traffic to your site. Google drops your result down if you have more than a few ads in the top part of your page (first part visible without scrolling). Even if you did have some sort of content there, you wouldn't be very high in results. So, you'd eventually find it not worth it. There is a good ratio, and it is about what you see from most sites. Any more, and you lose traffic. Any less and you lose money.

But, if you want to see some of those type of sites, look at domains that used to have decent traffic then got domain hijacked and overtaken by some Japanese company. They are usually filled with them due to the residual traffic.