Your content is distracting users from ads

Demand Media (and other ad-focused sites, but most remarkably their operation) understand this deep in their bones, which is why their content is to writing what chicken McNuggets are to chicken.

Nah, I uninstall crashy apps. And I, for one, never plan on buying anything they produce: how can you not notice <i>10 days</i> of your application failing to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh?<p>edit: Maybe this is part of the reason. Ratings from the iStore for the application in question:<p><pre><code> *****: 0 **** : 0 *** : 1 ** : 5 * : 9 </code></pre> Several other applications have similarly-weighted ratings, reports of crashing, etc, though a couple are higher. Color me disinterested.

This is why there are many websites that split their 20 paragraph articles over 10 pages, the lower the actual content on a page the bigger the chance of a click on an ad, and the bigger the total ad inventory.<p>Conversely, if your content is too compelling <i>nobody</i> will ever click on an ad.

A former employer (and this is one of the many reasons I don't work there any more) was well aware of this and took advantage of it all the time. Just to give one example, their 404 error was a page of ads...

This concept works great for custom 500 and 404 pages. Put an Adsense for Search box and make money when you're not able to serve something else.

It could also be that the user thought, since there was no content but the ad, that the app had switched to one of those "click the ad before seeing the story" type things and clicked the only thing available to get the working data.<p>Also, what kind of programmer doesn't have checks in data acquisition code to make sure it is valid and immediately alert someone when it is not?!?

I think this phenomenon is mainly about UX and IxD. If there's only one route presented to the user .. many of the users are likely to choose the single route presented to them.<p>Perhaps this is a trite point, but I'd argue that it's a good example of how presentation of advertising should be included as a key part of any UX and IxD strategy.

Those people will leave in anger. Why would they ever use his service again?

Isn't that just the same as all the spammy grabbed domains? Get a good domain name, put ads on it. I've heard some people make good money with such sites.

This reminds of a problem that many publishers have with Facebook's ad platform. Users are too engaged with the content to click on the ads.

That's the click through ratio, but what about the click counts?

Server error.