Our mobile traffic is exploding, and our new mobile layout is getting more popular too!

We’ve run into a challenge though: we display three ads on every page, but the mix of our ads is currently optimized for desktop visitors:

* Our traditional desktop layout has two ads in the sidebar and one ad in the main content area. All three ads are typically visible to desktop visitors.
* Meanwhile, our mobile layout hides the two ads in the sidebar, and shows the one ad in the main content area. So only one ad is typically visible to mobile visitors.

As the mix of our users shifts towards mobile, we’ve been brainstorming ways to have more ads visible outside of the sidebar. There are lots of options (video ad overlays, auto play ads, etc.) but we’re not comfortable with most of them - as they’re just too intrusive.

BLOG

In the end, we decided to use something similar to the NY Times’ mobile site. They put an ad (labeled as such) after about 6 paragraphs or so:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/business/media/rhapsody-the-in-flight-magazine-is-becoming-a-first-class-literary-journal.html

We put an ad in a similar place - right after the cut tag in our posts. You can see an example here:

http://www.hellobee.com/2014/07/02/the-3-best-apps-ever-according-to-my-kids-endless-alphabet-reader-and-numbers/

A few notes:

* If there’s no cut tag, then we don’t display this extra ad at all.
* To keep the number of ads on the page at 3, we removed one of the ads from the sidebar.

We've been running this new ad layout for the last week or so, and it's made a big difference!

BOARDS

For the boards, we're going to try two changes:

* We're increasing the number of threads per page from 30 to 40.
* We're moving one of the sidebar ads into the main content area of the boards frontpage, halfway down the page.

So the boards ad will appear after 20 topics have appeared. Before this there was no ad until 30 topics (at the bottom of the page), so hopefully this won't be too much of an adjustment. Let us know what you think after you've had a chance to get a feel for it,

We are going to try this out for the next week or two, and see if it makes a difference in revenue - especially with people using our mobile layout. We've been really reluctant to try this change, but with the shift to mobile causing sidebar ads to not appear, we've run out of options so wanted to test this.

We will keep you all posted on progress!