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Comment by ta3216 | Hacker News Reader

I thought I read somewhere that ads make a blog seem more authoritative so I disagree about not having ads.

I don't know about 'authoritative', but ads do seem to hurt. The existing experimental and quasi-experimental literature shows very bad effects on user behavior:

1. "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio", Huang et al 2018: https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... [experimental]

2."The Effect of Ad Blocking on [Firefox] User Engagement with the Web", Miroglio et al 2018: https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-... [quasi]

3. and my own A/B test: https://www.gwern.net/Ads [experimental]

I think it depends on the audience. Looking at your blog I can see how ads may not work as well. My blog is focused more on dining out, shopping etc where viewers think nothing of ads and I think they would even think it weird if there weren’t ads.

You could say that about both Pandora (radio is expected to have ads) and Mozilla's general Internet sampling frame (the Internet is expected to have ads), but they still find a large average harm.

My site is focused on shopping and dining out therefore I don’t think the conclusions in those papers apply in my case. The audio interruptions noted in the Pandora test are far more intrusive than in-page display ads. If I used interstitials then I would agree.

I really question that. I can't believe that in this day and age anyone thinks that having AdSense on a blog site is some indicator of superior quality. And affiliate links at least raise the possibility of conflicts of interest.

Way back when I experimented with ads and links but I came to the conclusion that the money was pretty trivial in the scheme of things and it took away from the otherwise non-commercial nature of my site.

Firstly my readers would have no idea what Adsense even is. But if they see accompanying ads like Swarovski, Nordstrom, local restaurant, then yes, I believe it would positively impact their impression on an intuitive level. If they actively thought about it then no. I can see how it wouldn’t appeal to other sites though.

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