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» MEDIA (1) Doh

I received an email today from one of our readers.

"I'm not a regular reader, but I do enjoy some of the articles posted on your site. The underling of selected terms within the articles that result in an ad being displayed when I mouse over them is one that has severely diminished my opinion of your site. I understand that advertisement is how you generate a lot of your revenue, but it is intrusive, distracting, and abrasive in my opinion. I'm sure many other users are equally annoyed by the practice and I hope you (among the many others that use this technique) will reconsider. Your readers are bombarded by enough advertisement already with roughly half of the screen's content being ads...I don't think having in-line ads that obstruct their view of your content while they attempt to scroll through an article is really necessary.

Signed,
Irritated Reader"

I love to get feedback from our audience, good or bad. It gives me an opportunity to reflect and it even influences decisions we make.

When I was first pitched on "contextual advertising" by Intellitext back in 2004, I was very concerned about how it would affect the readers. I even held off for a couple of months before launching. Surprisingly, when we finally launched, we received less than 6 complaints. Not bad considering over a million people read the site that month.

Like most advertising, none of us particularly like it. Most of the time we can ignore it. We can block it, scroll over it, and even Tivo it. But the reality is that it pays 100% for the content on this site. That includes the cost for things like server equipment and upgrades, monthly bandwidth and Internet access, writers and editors, IT support staff, sales staff, electricity, travel to locations like Vegas and Taiwan to cover trades shows, video equipment and coverage, software development like this media-blogging software I'm using now. Without advertising, we'd be out of business and there would be no more FiringSquad content.

Subscription? We've talked about adding a commercial free subscription area to FiringSquad for several years now. My feeling is that in order to make this viable, we'd need to offer exclusive content or special features for subscribers. That would require a lot of extra investment in time and staffing and would really only be considered by our regular readers and therefore doesn't even apply to you, Mr. Irritated Reader. You've already admitted that your not a regular reader. I'd like to know one thing. If you had come to FiringSquad to read, and we'd presented you with the option of reading our content with advertising or paying $1, which would you have chosen?

Feedback welcome.

DanT.