Investment Site Traffic Not Clicking Ads

I have an investment site and it is starting to get some search engine traffic. The problem is that the visitors are not clicking on ads and rarely stay very long.

I'm trying to figure out if this is one problem or two. First, if people are backing out of the site right away, then the problem is not that they don't click the ads, the problem is that they are not on the site long enough to even see the ads.

I have tried various redesigns to see if I can get the traffic to come into the site. No matter what design I use, the traffic continues to bounce.

Most of the traffic is coming into specific forum discussions. I wonder if people are looking for answers to their questions and decide that they want an "authority" answer so they get immediately turned off when they see the page is part of a forum?

The second problem is that the people who do gho through the site rarely click on ads. I think this is mostly because the ads on investment sites appear to be scammy. I use Google AdSense for the ads and many of them talk about "hot stock" or "get rich" pitches that I wouldn't click on either.

One investment blog I respect even decided to turn off their ads because they didn't want advertisers luring the visitors into bad decisions while he was trying to teach people to make good financial decisions.

I did some research into this issue and found out that some of the big investment sites don't rely on ad revenue for their profits. Most of the online investment sites make their money by getting people to pay for investment newsletters.

I'm going to continue working on my investment site. First, I enjoy writing about investing and I want to help people make better financial decisions. Hopefully, I will continue to get larger flows of traffic from the search engines if I keep adding content to my site. This will allow me to continue testing the traffic with both ads and investment newsletter affiliate programs.