Web advertising - saint or sinner?

As a product manager I want my site to be engaging, well designed, simple to use, include useful content, and fun! I don't think adding tons of pop ups and ads to take up all the space and annoy my users is going to help achieve this.

However, we all need to make money, and our site needs to be commercial. Especially in these dire times.

Recently I had a project to look at my site and produce mockups with the designer for new ad positions.

I think by making keeping to a few rules we can minimise annoyance levels:

• The ads should be consistent - not in different places on each page
• They should obviously be advertisements - we are a personal financial information site which writes many articles about things like new credit cards, mortgages, bank accounts... our jornalists recommend ones they like for real reasons, not because we're being paid.
• We should try to avoid too many on one page, but we need to have some 'above the fold' as those are the ones people pay most for.
• We don't want ads which roll over the whole screen
• If possible we'd like to avoid ads with too much movement (although most do these days)
• The positioning should fit with our new page design, align with our borders and layout
• The content should be relevant to the page content, users don't mind seeing an ad if it's something which might interest them
• Each position should be commercial - if it wasn't going to give sufficient revenue, there's no point in taking up the space

We also have an issue because on our financial comparison page we want users to click on the products we offer there, that makes us the big bucks, not the advertising. Somehow certain moneysupermarkets seem to be able to put hundreds of ads on these pages and still be making a mint but with the amount of traffic they have maybe it is a different situation.

After several meetings and mockups we eventually settled on a banner and an MPU on most pages, keeping them in consistent positions and also fairly standard when compared to what most other similar sites are doing.

Hopefully we won't see a sudden drop in traffic when they go live soon!

In the future I hope we can start looking at other formats and methods other than straight web position ads, maybe like sponsorship of certain areas, or advertising in our video podcasts. These demos by google adsense for video give me a few ideas...