Ask anyone, expert or otherwise, about banner ads and what they'll tell you is this: Be careful. Annoy your users with too many of them, and they'll abandon you. Ply them with popups and you'll lose all your traffic. Limit the advertising you use to a bare minimum, because people just can't stand it.
All bullshit.
Throw three simultaneous popups on your site and you'll get one or two complaints, but that's a drop in the bucket if you're a serious content site with millions of people surfing your pages all at once. Sure there's a dedicated group of hippies who run around with the ridiculous notion that no one should be allowed to make money on the internet, but the truth is this: I have never seen anyone's traffic negatively impacted by banner ads.
And let me tell you, I've seen some bad ones.
I've spent nearly a decade experimenting with this on a variety of websites and in a variety of different formats, and I can tell you that people don't care or notice. Use the worst flash animation imaginable, the most annoying popups, the most horrific takeover ads possible... and people will keep right on coming. It won't even cause a dip in your visits in the short term, and in the long term your traffic will probably grow because you'll have more money to invest back into bringing content to your site to draw in more visitors.
So why aren't more sites infested with "click here now for free money" popups? It's not about their users, but their competitors. Overload your site with annoyances and the guy who's trying to steal your traffic will start bragging about how much more "user friendly" his site is. You'll be quickly labeled as greedy and a moneygrubber. Your users may not actually understand what any of that means, but they know it's a bad thing, and the appearance of being user friendly is far more important than the actual act of being so.
Of course, you're probably thinking that not everyone who surfs the internet can possibly be that dumb. That's true, they're not. But, it's the dumb ones you really want. Dumb people keep the internet running. Smart people don't click on banner ads, and if your users don't click on your banner ads, you don't make any money. Only dumb, clueless people click on banner ads. Only your elderly parents who have trouble operating a mouse actually think trying to shoot that animated monkey is really a good idea. And it's from those people that almost every banner-ad driven website you visit makes not some, but all of its money.
More on some of the ways dumb people dominate the internet, in a future post.
