Are Blogads Worth It?

We keep running into sites not loading due to their Blogads.  Michelle Malkin’s is a good example (click for larger in new window):

That doesn’t capture the full page.  It comes up one big column to the left, with ads at the bottom.  No content.  At one point I tried inserting the www in front of the URL and it worked, but not anymore.

Deb seems to catch more of these than I do, and has seen it at Rosemary’s and elsewhere too.  Even sites that do it frequently don’t always do it, though Michelle Malkin’s seems to be on its way there.

Day By Day is another example, but different (click for larger):

Sometimes it simply won’t load, but more often Day By Day loads, then refreshes itself and shows the above page that lacks content and only shows ads.  That isn’t so bad, as hitting the back button takes you back to the latest witty, brilliant, amusing strip so you can get your daily fix.  But still, it’s easy for someone to be confused, not notice the back button is available after the reload, and go away annoyed.

Are Blogads really worth this?  Assuming the basic methodology is sound, I see a great business opportunity for a competitor with superior bandwidth and server capacity, and whatever other changes are necessary to ensure that ads don’t fail to load, slow down the host page, and otherwise mangle or hog the host page.

Seeing the problems has kept us from signing up for Blogads.  Nevermind that we are on the low side, hit-wise, and could justify all of $5 - 10 a week for an ad, so it’s not much of a loss.  We might experiment with our own ads, in addition to the link ads we recently sold.  We just can’t see ruining the site experience for them.

Update:

Here’s another example.  Sometimes Smash (The Indepundit) simply won’t load.  Other times it loads, then spontaneously reloads and stays forever in the state you see below:

Update:
This post added to Beltway Traffic Jam.

1. What’s really odd about Smash’s is that the http://lt-smash.us/ link never ever loads for me, but the indepundit.com one does.

   Posted by Ith  on  02/22  at  06:51 PM

2. And people wonder why my blog doesn’t have ads. I’ve seen lengthy downloads (time-wise, not data-wise) because of ‘hang-ups’ with BlogAds.

   There’s something screwy with their code. It’s not uncommon for me to have to reload a website like Indepundit because it ends up in a ‘wyciwyg’ black hole (that’s ‘What you click is what you get’.

   Posted by DCE  on  02/23  at  08:44 AM

3. try it in Explorer.... I know, I know.. Firefox is better, yahda, yada… but I’ve been running into problems where code-intensive pages hang on stuff that’s probably wrong in the CSS and/or HTML.

   I’ve noticed it with other things, too.. it has to do with scripting sometimes, too.

   Posted by Jim S  on  02/23  at  12:03 PM

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