Question 1

If your income is largely determined by advertising revenue, should you simply accept an ad that ruins your website’s layout? Grin and bear it?

Citroen (the car manufacturer who accused me of a gender error) celebrated their 90th anniversary this week. They celebrated with an ad. I prefer cake, but there you go. The Citroen birthday ad considerably slowed down the loading time of my newspaper’s homepage. For about 30 seconds, all I saw was this:

Twitter was awash with tweets about the ad. Some people found the ad in itself annoying. Others pointed out that it totally screwed up the newspaper site’s layout. Both were legitimate complaints.

Question 2

Should you show the tweets about your site on your site? 

A lot of companies show the tweets that mention their name on their website. Sometimes those tweets are positive. Sometimes they’re not. And sometimes they’re really really not.

Please don’t look at the screenshot below if you’re of a sensitive disposition.

Question 3

What do you think?

Is there no such thing as bad publicity?
Does it harm your brand if you show negative feedback on your own site?
Or does it show that you’re honest?