So for the last day and a half I started testing Vibrant Media's in-text ads on Good-Tutorials. This is not something that I was keen on doing. Vibrant Media sent me an email and wanted to set something up on my site. I initially told them point-blank that no, I had no interest in running their ads. (If you haven't seen them before, you toss some JavaScript into your page, and then they analyze your content and add links to a few words on your page. They're double underlined, and when you mouse over them an ad appears.) Long story short, though, they mentioned a few rather high numbers in comparison to other ad networks and I decided to give them a shot for a couple of days.
Surprisingly enough, they're good so far. Good to the point of reminding me of Google's first few weeks with AdSense. As with most things, I'm not sure how long they'll remain as profitable, but for now they're definitely keeping me interested.
The issue, of course, is whether or not this is a good thing. There's something to be said about intrusiveness... that they could be confused with real links and then you're basically "tricking" your user into clicking on an ad. In that regard I don't feel as terrible, since for Good-Tutorials I'm limiting them to 2 links per page, and I tend to think that the floating ad is fairly clear that it's an ad. But still, I'm concerned.
It's something I've always been really concerned about: putting ads on to recoup server costs and my work costs, and balancing that with maintaining a positive user experience for everyone who visits the site. I'm not going to inundate my visitors with ads to the point where it would turn them off from the site. With that said, I still think it's important to make some money off of my time and effort. In the past I've tried a lot of things... interstitials (which were dropped in a day or two), pop unders, regular banner ads, text links, featured tutorials, etc. Online advertising can be a really challenging market in that respect. But at least it keeps it interesting.
What are your thoughts on this form of advertising compared to other forms out there?