Desperate for Ad Revenue, Not Readers

The rant begins...

I write this in desperate frustration over the formatting of two of my favorite blogs, Triple Pundit and GreenBiz.com. I know entirely too well that the state of publishing good journalism is getting more and more difficult because of the failing economy and an even more abysmal printing industry, but these websites have some of the poorest layouts I have ever seen.

How do they expect their readers to chose to visit their pages instead of just reading from an RSS Reader when you click through to the original article and you have to sit and think for a minute which part of the page is actually the story you want to read. I've complained about this in public forums before, but if these websites actually want people to visit each article's original page and possibly click on some links, they need to tone down the over-advertisement and use more focused techniques rather than screwing up the entire aesthetic of the page.

I'd say GreenBiz.com has a much worse layout than Triple Pundit, but either way, neither of them are good. They need to do their content justice and make it stand out more on the page. The articles are usually brilliant and cutting edge, so if they can target their advertising in relation to the topic of the article, I'd bet they'd make even more money than they do from splashing small ads all over the place.

Okay, my rant is done.