Adverts are they worth it?

[Desert Storm]

Well are they, i know they bring in money and stuff.

[moonman]

I don't have any adverts on my site, and I would only use them as a last resort. I hate them, especially ones in pop up windows.

[moospot]

I run a few banners on my site, but they are more for swapping links than to generate income.

[Sarah]

no ads or banners on mine we have a links page but thats all.... keep them away

[ghodfather]

I've got nothing against them, per se. However, the extremely intrusive practices of pop-up, pop-behind, on-exit, etc., advertising are out of the question.

So long as they are unobtrusive, low-filesize, and topically inoffensive to the site's audience, I don't see anything wrong with them. To many, such adds are largely invisible, it seems.

And as a mechanism for driving traffic back and forth in a link exchange type program, they can be quite useful to the site, to the advertiser, and to the user (assuming the links being exchanged are actually complimentary of one another).

My 0.02....

[Technosailor]

I'm not a fan of ads on my site as I don't know what will be diesplayed. Now if I controlled who advertised, I wouldn't mind. Maybe one day I'll have that kind of traffic...

Sketch

[Droopy]

I'm trying out some button-banner system but you don't get real traffic from it that's for sure.

[takoYAKi]

They're fine as long as they're not over the place. Long banners are a no-no, they're evil lil critters, especially when your layouts is all frames. I think one or two 88*31 buttons are fine as long as you don't put 1085107105 of them in one page.

[M. Johansson]

Advertising is a good thing, if done like the advert on this very page (i.e. well-targeted, non-animated, informative, and unobtrusive)

Popunders and banners, on the other hand, is a retarded form of advertising that is all but useless for all parties, and will probably die a gruesome death when the last boneheads in marketing discover that users ignore banners and close popups on reflex.

I have never ever checked out something that was on a banner or a popunder. However, I have checked out almost every ad on the sitepoint forums, since they are nice and informative and dont try to sell to me the hard way.