Usability vs. revenue? Nope. Usability = revenue.

Over at BeyondVC, Ed Sim wrote

It is this battle between usability (simple and clean) vs. revenue (balance between getting what you want vs. being cluttered) that is constantly fought behind the scenes.

It's interesting that there's a perception that making a site usable is separate from doing revenue generating activities (like adding banner ads or splash entry pages, as was pointed out at Forbes.com. Even more interesting was the idea that there exists in many companies a battle between the two.

I'm not really surprized. But, I do know that there are more and more "enlightened" sites out there. They understand that usability is directly tied to revenue. Usability goes up, revenue goes up. And the other way around. Adding a few banner ads might get you some small short term revenue gains, but if you upset your paying customers, they're gonna go somewhere else (unless of course, your site is devoted to banner-ad seeking customers). There might be a few web sites that people will continue to go to even when they're hard to use, but yours probably isn't one of them.

There's lots of good examples out there, like 37signals. Take a look. Then make sure that your usability effort isn't competing with your revenue.