There are many different ways of monetising the traffic that comes to a website. Some website owners might try to sell a product or service 
on the website. Some might use affiliation to earn on commission. Some might incorporate sponsored content and other sponsorships to make money. However, by far the most popular choice for website owners is with adverts, namely with pay per click advertising. As much as it is the most popular way to monetize a website for a number of benefits, there are some drawbacks to running adverts on a website. In this article, I’ll look into the main pros and cons of doing just this.
Pros
Easy to Monetize
Running adverts on a website is a really easy way to make money. Once you have placed the code onto your website, that ad unit will have competitors automatically bid for the ad space, with the highest bigger winning the space. Once clicked on, the advertiser pays you, the publisher, for the traffic they have gained.
Due to this implicit simplicity, it is a proven formula that saves online publishers time with faffing around with different monetization methods, as well as being the most financially sensible solution to profiting from traffic.
AI and Machine Learning Improving Results
Where the likes of pay per click advertising has really grown is with artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are many companies out there now, such as the likes of Ezoic, that will automatically test hundreds of different ad placeholders, to automatically determine and continually adapt the ad placeholders on a website to best suit the traffic coming to them, either for user experience, revenue or both.
This means the time spent changing placeholder location to make more money has gone, which is extremely attractive for a website owner (to save time and make more money from it).
Cons
Website Load Time
An inherent problem with PPC advertising comes with the code of the adverts themselves. The added code of adverts on a website will naturally cause your website to slow down, unfortunately. This then becomes a trade off between having more adverts, at the cost of a an increased website loading time, but more revenue, or the opposite.
User Experience
Depending on the adverts and quantity on them will depend on how it affects the experience web users have when browsing your website. Getting the right density of adverts can improve user experiences, which is what Ezoic has actually found. However, having too much, and quickly your website becomes cluttered, ‘spammy’ looking and will generally look less attractive for the web user. This in turn, will negative impact the statistics of your website.
