Everyone knows that too many websites have too much advertising.  How often do you just want to read a few paragraphs without some strobe light animated spam gif flashing in your peripheral vision?  I know, it sucks!  I understand that this is how websites pay the bills, but you have got to be kidding me.  Dailymotion used to be one of my favorite sites to watch a video, but now it has far too much advertising.  If you haven’t visited recently, you probably haven’t noticed that most of the time you have to sit through a 30 second ad at the beginning of most new videos.  Even the short ones that are only a few minutes long themselves! You will probably notice, unless this article has been scraped, that ELWsoftware.com also has ads on the blog pages.  Sorry.

The truth, if you want to hear it, is that ads don’t make very much money for small web sites.  Relatively speaking ads won’t make you much money on big websites either.  Everyone likes the Madmen show and how it portrays a golden age where advertising actually worked well.  Where are we now?  Google makes a huge amount of money on advertising, but that only shows that advertisers are paying.  This doesn’t mean that you, as an intelligent human being, are watching.  In my opinion, Google sells higher positions in search results, not ads.  The fact that they put the results off to the side doesn’t fool too many.  By the way, does anyone wonder why so many major companies pay for Google advertising for their own name?  Why would Godaddy buy the keyword godaddy?  This doesn’t make any sense to me.  Of course they make money on it, but it seems more like they are paying for some kind of mob protection scheme.

What can be done about this over-advertising problem?  People trying to make money will always be willing to beg for attention through whatever means necessary.  Sooner or later they will discover how little they money is buying.  What if there was a new search engine that heavily weighted results that have very little advertising?  That could work.  Until then, I suggest replacing the ads on small websites with this simple promotional message:

This is where the advertising would have been if we wanted to annoy you.  You’re welcome.