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Comment by asparagui | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of this site is to maximize the time users spend looking at the content. The problem lies in that you think the content is the article, when it fact it is the ads. Once you take this into consideration, this is an excellent layout.

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But the question is - would I look at more ads if I read more content? right now I am reading 1 article, looking at all the content. but they have the opportunity to have me read 5 articles, thus looking at more ads overall. In fact, the current layout is so bad, I don't even read all the articles that I land on from HN, simply because I get too frustrated with so much ads.

I agree with you. If I see a lot of ads, I'll simply leave. By then maybe I'm not their target audience. I have visited Forbes many times from HN but never noticed ads because I either use AdBlock on my laptop or send article to Readability!

But if they want more impressions, they should let us read content first. If I like the content, I'll surely follow their recommendations for sharing and ads.

You're right to ask the question. But (a) the site isn't optimized for you, and (b) Forbes is trying to make money. So your blog post comes across as (I'm sorry to say) naive.

If you want to find out these kinds of answers for yourself, try running an advertising-supported website for a few months — it could be genuinely interesting.

I completely understand that Forbes is trying to make money and I hope they do. I assure you that I don't expect to read content for free, even if it's free. However, I believe that by encouraging me to read more of their content, in ways that would actually keep me on their site, overall would increase the number of ads that I get to see. Right now I came and I left because I was so put off by the clutter, but like I said at the end of the post, whenever I visit qz.com , I always read a lot more because I don't feel interrupted. If Forbes gave me more content and fewer ads, I would read more and would thereby see more ads. Maybe I am just not in the target audience, since I very very rarely click on the ads.

I don't know qz.com's financials, but the ad:content ratio of a profitable publication is normally a lot higher than what they have. Which suggests they're either strategically de-prioritizing advertising for the short term in order to build up audience, or they are struggling to sell space.

In the long-term, I would expect that for you to continue to enjoy quality content on qz.com, you'll probably be disappointed by an increasing amount of advertising. Whether it's in-between scrolling articles, or in the form of advertorial, or a banner at the top of the screen, it will come :( Such is the way of the world.

But then you look at Daily Mail[0] and see they do nearly the opposite of Forbes. They have a lot more content than they have ads, and they are profitable.

0: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

The real joke here is: how much of the content on Forbes.com is "real" or interesting (and not merely sensationalism or rehashing others' articles)?

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