In text ads

Posted Sep 4, 2007 16:30 UTC (Tue) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217)
Parent article: LWN advertising update

Please don't.

I feel that in-text ads make a site look "trashy". I associate them with low-quality sites with little original content (or content that is mainly gossip and rumors). You know, the kind of site where every story is a short summary of the real article (on someone else's site), plus a misleading headline designed to attract a link from Digg.

It is not that in-text ads would annoy me personally (in fact, I just enabled them in my preferences). Rather, I am concerned that they would create a negative first impression for people seeing LWN for the first time.