This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately in relation to my biggest blog – FlightSimX. I’ve included a screenshot below, so you don’t need to visit the site to see what I’m referring to.

Now, the biggest “problem” for me is that dirty great AdSense ad right under the post title. I’ll be honest, I don’t like it being there. So, a few days back, I decided to move it to where the video is in the screenshot. To me, this made the site look a lot neater. The post itself consisted of, well, just the post, with no embedded ads. The problem is, people stopped clicking on the ad. Additionally, having closely monitored my stats for those few days, it seemed to make absolutely no difference to visitor numbers or the time those visitors spent on the site. Given that the ad revenue dropped to around 5% of what it was, I moved it back and now the ad revenue is back to where it was before the move.

Initially, I thought I was kind of not being true to myself. Here I was, deliberately “breaking” what I thought was a nice design to maximise revenue. But then I thought about it a little further. How often do I “read” my own blog? Sure, I look at it multiple times per day. I look at it to make sure the post I just made looks okay and to make sure I haven’t broken it with any recent modifications, but I don’t “read” my own blog.

I write the blog for other people to read. Given that my readers didn’t seem to mind the ad being there (using the stats as a guideline), I figure that that should be good enough for me.

So, a question for you all. Have you designed your blog so it looks good to you, or have you designed it to generate the maximum revenue?