Ask HN: Should I put display ads on my site?

[pixellab]

I'm in the process of overhauling a free web tool that also displays user generated content. I never incorporated ads in the old site and am considering putting them in the new site on pages that publicly display user's content. I'll probably build a freemium model in the future (ad-free, more features, etc.)

Is this the right time for me to start incorporating ads?

[MichaelCrawford]

Maybe.

My website has articles and essays on a wide variety of unrelated topics. Ads associated with some topics got lots of clicks, others didnt however most of my pages get lots of organic links.

My advice is to remove ads from pages that dont yield clicks. The links are worth far more than ad revenue.

[pixellab]

Good insight. I like the idea of removing ads from pages that don't get clicks.

My biggest concern is, my users are the ones generating the content. I want to be sensitive to that, but at the same time would like to generate some revenue I can put back into things like upgrading hosting from VPS to AWS, building new features, etc.

[MichaelCrawford]

Link popularity in general, pagerank in particular is transitive. A link to a page with no ads will result in greater ad revenue from some other page.

That is, if I link to Alice and Alice links to Bob, my Alice links generates more traffic for Bob.

[pixellab]

Yes, makes total sense.

In my case, my pages are the equivalent of Bob's, they are at the end of the link referral line. Users create content on my site and link to it from their sites. If it were blog or article type content, I would think there's no issue putting ads on the content, but seeing how my site is a web tool/app, it seems like more of a gray area. There's risk I'll piss off my users. I'm trying to decide if it's even worth going down that road.