Should A Company Blog Have Ads?

The Pros and Cons of On-Blog Advertising

It’s a funny thing sometimes, consulting for our client’s blogs. Often, our clients express identical opinions and questions to those we’ve expressed internally at one time or another. Specifically when it comes to the debate around on-blog advertising, I often find myself telling clients “you wouldn’t believe how much we understand your position right now”. While sounding ’salesy’, it couldn’t be more true.

Running a company blog, you’re bound to think at one time or another “hmmmmm. Maybe this blog can help the early stage of the business by generating ad revenue!” Before immediately dialing up Google (if you still have dial-up that is) and jumping on the Adsense bandwagon, I’d suggest that you take a moment to consider some pros and cons of having ads on your blog.

Pros:

1. Ads provide additional revenue for your business. Especially if you’re a self-funded start up, squeezing money out of every opportunity might be your M.O. and blog ads can definitely help in this area. For example, at an entrepreneurs meetup event on Tuesday, I met a blogger who was making $5k/month from just the Google ads on her blog and her other ad services did even better (she gets 12 Million page views a month). Clearly, if you have the traffic, you can can make the ca$h with very little effort.
2. Ads can provide readers with additional resources. Don’t have a resources/library/learn/etc link on your blog where readers can go to find additional related info? Luckily, well-targeted ads (provided through a good service), can benefit your readers by providing additional, related resources to augment your content.
3. Ads can put your readers at ease. While initially counter-intuitive, I personally think this point has great merit. On-blog ads are not common on most company blogs. So by having ads, you are subconsciously making your company blog appear more like a regular, non-company blog, thereby putting the readers in a different mindset. If the company blog also provides great content (aka the blog is useful in its own right), the presence of ads can have a similar effect on the readers as viral marketing videos have on their viewers. By putting the blog readers at ease, they are more likely to let down their “I’m being sold to” defenses and consider your content more fairly and openly.

Cons:

1. Ads clutter your blog. Many blogs are already so cluttered by widgets and unwieldy blogrolls that ads might not be the main problem in this area. However, adding ads to even a clean blog can cause the blog to become cluttered and unwelcoming to the eye. Even if you think your blog exists solely to promote your business, the reason people come to your blog is to read, correct? Don’t lose sight of this; readability is of the utmost importance.
2. Without proper planning you can accidentally advertise competitors. Even with a well-targeted ad service, it may be hard to ensure your competitors don’t get onto your site to steal your readers/business. Unless you’re extremely diligent in babysitting your ads, that new destination URL your competitor created last week isn’t going to be blocked by your ad service. Before you realize it, your competitors may have taken precious loyalty and attention away from your brand. Is the revenue stream provided by the ads worth undermining the business the blog was created to promote?
   
3. Ads look unprofessional. People have different expectations of a company blog than other blogs. A professional look and feel is often one of those expectations and ads detract from this professional look. Do you want to enter a competitive situation against a competitor that looks more professional than you in any way?

As you can see from the layout of this blog, we’ve chosen to remain ad-free. Most companies have more to gain from improving their consumer touch points than from advertising on their blog. If the world-at-large has an exceptional experience with your company blog, that can’t be a bad thing. Think about who your readers are and how they will react to ads on your blog. Then apply the Golden Rule.

If you need help figuring out whether your business can support ads, I’ve created a flow chart that takes you through the high-level questions quickly. Points in the chart that require further clarification are marked by purple numbers and will be discussed below.

1. By “probably fine” I mean that I’d be willing to bet it wouldn’t have an adverse affect on the success of your blog. Clearly some people will prefer no ads in all situations, but I view these people (myself included) as the fringe.
2. “Significant Revenue” could be clarified further by saying “revenue that would have a significant impact on the success of your business”. Significant, here, refers to business needs, not some subjective measure of dollar amounts.
3. Web-based companies often use their blog as the main way to reach the online community. If the blog is the main way people interact with your brand, meaning your company hasn’t begun to utilize other interactive online avenues, I believe ads are not worth the ‘Cons’ they bring with them.
4. As outlined in the ‘Cons’ section above, ads in many cases can drive business away and otherwise decrease your conversion rate. The ‘cost’ I’m referring to is any lost business caused indirectly or directly by these ‘Cons.’

Clearly, putting ads on a company blog is an involved decision. Our experience speaking to clients going through this exact decision has provided us with insights that I’ve attempted to aggregate here. I hope my thoughts help anyone going through this decision process.

Any opinions and insights are welcome.

Welcome to PandemicBlog. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can stay connected. Thanks for visiting!