Footnote 7: Of advertising and feedback
WordPress accepted our Word Ads application, so this means that we have ads on The Background Story. Those ads can’t be resized or repositioned, but they can be switched off. We do wish to earn a little extra, but we care about what you think.
Are the ads distracting or unnoticeable? Can you ignore them, or do they take up most of your attention? Do you think it will benefit our blog or harm it in the long run? We would like to know your opinion!
Footnotes and Margins 
I am okay with the ads. 🙂 I understand why some like to put up ads. ( I do, too) Your post have my full attention.
I am with Ryan on this one. You deserve it. Also, you probably have a lot of viewers that are not logged into WP and they would be getting ads anyway, unless you had paid WP for there to be none.
It would be interesting to know if one does not use the sidebar (like on my blog) whether ads would still place themselves there, thus reducing the size of images. That would be distracting to me and a very good reason to not run ads. But on your layout, its not a big deal.
Sadly, WP will require you to enable the sidebar if you want to place ads. 😦 -C
Well, I don’t want to so that is OK, but it sure is good to know that they have these limitations – ads or design, but not both. Seems pretty silly to me, should be able to design the ads in so they work best in a particular theme, maybe get fewer $$ if not up front and centre/right. I hope it works well for you.
Ehpem, we hope to move to self-hosting soon so we can make the ads more tasteful. It is frustrating to not have a choice at all. A big reason why we activated the ads is to see how the whole thing works. If we have a big drop in visitors and/or if we just get peanuts, there’s a big chance we’ll drop the ads. We just want to check out what will happen! 🙂 – L
Hey L – thanks for running the experiment and seeking feedback, it could help out the rest of us. I don’t find the ads too obnoxious on your layout. I would be bothered if they were making your space smaller and your photos too, but that does not seem to be the case.
We’re not really expecting much, just hopefully enough to cover the fee for the domain, but apparently that’s hoping for too much considering the traffic that we get (it’s still kinda low). So if all we get out of this is a few pennies, we’ll most likely remove the ads because we don’t have control over them. 😦 Anyway, yeah, thankfully our pics can still fit in without us having to resize them. But we don’t post high-res pics, so I guess for blogs like yours wherein the photos are wonderfully and beautifully high-res, the ads can be a problem. – L
Not distracting. And if it generates revenue for you all… keep them. You deserve it.
Thank you. This is just an experiment and to be honest, we’re not expecting a lot. Perhaps, just to cover the fee for the domain name. :0 We’ll see! – L