Apart from the garish shock of five ads being thrust in your face before any content, I wasn’t particularly bothered about the layout of the site. If the readers like it and it loads well, then everybody is happy.
What’s more important is what shows in the ad spaces. The ads are untargeted so the space is a commodity and will be priced as such. It also appears like the publisher has reached an pricing ceiling hence the need to create more ad spaces. In addition, the publisher is not structured to serve smaller advertisers who are more concerned about performance and won’t buy at the same price as the whales. Everything will be great as long as the whales keep buying. Yahoo! had that strategy. Look at where they are now.
Well targeted ads always attract a premium, so why not provide that feature to advertisers, as opposed to selling untargeted ad spaces at commodity prices. You serve more advertisers (i.e. customers) and make more money. Any publisher without ad tech is just leaving easy money on the table. Heck, even Nairaland has basic ad targeting, self-service advertising, and demand driven pricing.
Even Radar has a long way to go. @lordbanks - your beautiful forum can do better than this:
