Okay, I logged out and looked at the site. Below is a perspective that is broader than just this Business question, but it’s because I believe we are asking the wrong question. My comments are harsh but I’m trying to provide a perspective of a new internet roamer, not me as a registered user.
1. The ads are slightly better than a few weeks ago when I was logged out, but as you can see above fuck that abusive shit. Not only do the ads cover the whole pages in some cases, I wasn’t able to shut the window sitting front and center top. And every few scrolls resulted in a complete failure to load the page. Sometimes it came back and sometime I just went into failure to load. Unregistered users will see this and keep on scrolling past the site because it’s just too abusive and frustrating.
2. While I agree that this issue isn’t specifically relevant to the Business forum, I believe the better question to ask is why isn’t the site growing more, with more content in many forums. A lot of the forums are stale, not just Business. It’s because the established users of the site have their favorite forums and that’s where they focus. You want more traffic in other forums, get more users with other interests.
3. What would help is a front and center message to unregistered users that makes it easy to see that they can avoid ads and have other benefits for registering, like not having to remember where you stopped reading a thread, etc.
4. Of course fewer ads means less revenue, but maybe there is a way to get better ads that produce more click through or as you discussed before, make them sponsored ads instead of google ads. The business section (investments) in particular would potentially be attractive. Trey’s firm might even sponsor it.
A good customer experience is the first rule of getting customers, keeping customers, and increasing usage. There are certain websites I refuse to visit, like Forbes, because the ads are so intrusive and technically screwing up the page loads.