The New LeoAds Mechanic that was introduced a bit more than a week ago caught the community by surprise and was quickly seen as a innovative, ground-breaking change to what people in crypto are familiar with these days. We have always been aware and used to the burning mechanism and that you basically burn crypto to increase the price of the token. 
All LEO token holders will, after that change, grow their stake because the Ad Revenue will be split between the holders instead of just burned and forever deleted. There are literally endless of posts talking about this, so I won't go into any details about that specifically.
A quick reminder is to disable your ad-blockers.
LeoFinance incentivized any- and all SEO efforts by doing this, because traffic has become even more vital for growth. This is one of reasons for my recent posts. I have always believed in optimization and I have always known the importance of organic traffic. I know that organic traffic is what will take us to new heights.
If you haven't seen it already, I recommend taking a look at my previous post:
We want more traffic and we have dozens of people out there putting in tons of effort producing outward facing content, sharing links on social media and we have a bunch of people who're working hard to keep the current users here by producing inward facing content, reblogging and rewarding content creators. A nice mix between the two, but we still need more outward facing content. A lot more to reach the new heights we are longing for.
That being said, instead of talking much about what we, content creators and curators can do to increase growth in terms of traffic, I figured I would talk more about increasing Ad Revenue.
I did that in the past as well, but this has become such a crucial thing for us these days, so I will be re-using some of the screenshots from back in those days and show you, Khal & LeoFinance, exactly what you (and we) can do to boost our Ad Revenue and pave the way for other Hive communities simultaneously.
The design or layout above is often what you are usually striving for when it comes to simple, effective and user-friendly websites or blogs that you want to earn Ad Revenue from.
I personally like the design of LeoFinance and if you compare the screenshot above with how LeoFinance looks today, you will see similarities:
While I do like the design of LeoFinance today, I believe we could have greater results in terms of Ad Revenue with the current traffic we have.
One of the biggest mistakes according to me is to not have visible ads immediately on the front page. I know, people in general hate ads and that is the very reason for them to use Ad blockers, but even though Ad revenue varies greatly month-to-month, it almost always surpasses $4000.
As things are today, you have to scroll down ~15 posts before you see the very first Ad, and after that you will have to scroll down another ~15 posts before you will see the next Ad.
This is one of the biggest mistakes according to me, because you miss out on impressions from people who are not scrolling down a bunch of posts from the get go. We all know that most people are not searching on page 2, 3 or 4 on google whenever they search for something. They look at the search results on the top of the first page. The same thing goes for LeoFinance, Hive or other communities as well.
The posts that are being showcased on the front page are the most popular ones. As curation is as easy as just upvoting content by a click of a button, and we know the common saying: that you can vote 10 times per day if you want to use all your vp and regain it, it is not likely that people are scrolling down ~15 posts.
- That basically means that we are missing out on Ad Revenue.
I would recommend something different. These suggestions might be seen as minimal, but they are definitely going to boost Ad exposure, hence increase the overall Ad Revenue.
You would obviously have to make room for a decent-sized ad, but by having ads in a position like this you would most likely yield more impressions in total, as the ad would be visible from the moment someone visits LeoFinance.io. That leads to more impressions, hence more Ad revenue.
This is what I would recommend:
I honestly don't think that the suggestion above is good, but placing Ads in one of these places would rapidly increase the impressions.
If we look at the profiles on LeoFinance instead, we have this:
While this is a good position for the Ad, as it is placed at the top left corner and being visible the second someone looks at a profile, I think it looks a bit out of place.
I would rather go for something like this instead:
That change might not affect the amount of impressions, but it looks a lot more clean and polished according to me. It also keeps the professional and smooth look of the site.
I would probably think about deleting the filter to the right as well, as I have never used it personally, but there might be others out there who does..?
This leads us to the next thing.
This is how it looks when you are reading an article on LeoFinance.
There are no Ads within the article which is a good thing. You don't want to overuse Ads and it is frustrating for consumers to have Ads in the middle of the articles they are reading. The Ads are instead placed at the bottom of the article, between the article and the comment section like this:
This looks really good and doesn't disturb. However, you have Ads within the comment sections as well. I am not entirely sure, but I am fairly certain of the fact that they show up depending on the amount of comments..
That is nothing I would change, but I would make changes at the top of the articles instead and utilize some of that space for Ads instead, like this:
This would definitely have an immediate affect on the amount of impressions the Ads get, as everyone who reads an article starts at the top. There are no guarantees whatsoever for content consumers to read entire articles from top to bottom though, so we are likely to miss out on impressions if the Ads are at the bottom of the articles like they are today.
- What Do You Think?