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As everyone knows that in the beginning days of startups everyone tries to lay low on the cash flow so my question here is that is it a good idea to have ads on the startups(websites)? And if the answer is yes then what kinds of ads should be allowed like using a 3rd party tool like Google adsense is a good idea or take a sponsorship from 2-3 sponsors and just display their ads?

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4 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Generally there is no point in having Ads in the early days of a startup. Reasons:

  • Users want to use a good product/service and so you should start with a good product, which will (hopefully) be followed by lots of users, after which you can consider putting up the ads.
  • Users are not coming to your website for Ads, and as you said that the startup is in early days so it would already be a bit difficult to attract users (I'm not doubting the quality of your product/service but even for super awesome products it's usually a challenge to convince users about the usefulness of your product), you don't want to do anything which makes user experience negative at all. Ads slow down your page (yeah not much, but still why add useless latency), clutter the page (unless you do it extremely carefully and creatively) and distracts user from what he came for.
  • As far as monetization through Ads is concerned, for early days you can safely assume that it won't help but might actually distract you from doing more important things and waste time.

Hope it helps.

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up vote 5 down vote

It doesn't make any sense to me for two reasons:

  1. You are giving visitors extra incentive to leave your website when, instead, you should be doing everything possible to drive them to landing pages and convert them to leads.
  2. The amount of money you're likely to make will be negligible (unless you have extremely high traffic, in which case you shouldn't need the AdSense revenue).
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up vote 4 down vote

Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales.

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up vote 3 down vote

I would say though, that if you are intending advertising to be a revenue stream for your startup.

  1. Trialling ads can give you some realistic metrics about conversion and how much money you may be able to earn in future if you scale up traffic.

  2. You should think about ad slots in your design, even if you just populate them with placeholders for now. That way when you turn them on, you are not going to piss off your customers by giving them a big shock or having to make compromises to the interface to introduce them.

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