Fun With Contextual Advertising: Consumerist

Hoisted then atomic wedgied by our own petard! After our recent post about the dangers of contextual advertising in regards to KFC, Consumerist Daniel M. wrote us with a screenshot of our contextual advertising… specifically in regards to our Reader Tries To Cancel AOL post. Click it to the right to see what Daniel saw.

BURNED! In our defense, AOL isn’t really an advertiser on this site. That’s just Google Ads at work, squirting up whatever text ad it thinks is relevant from the context of our page in order to put pennies in the pocket of our Network Overlords.

But just to be clear: we have nothing against posting stories criticizing companies who happen to be advertisers… when they deserve it. Of course, they might have issues with that, which might explain the Consumerist’s spartan number of corporate advertisers when compared to the other Gawker sites. We’re Gawker’s cuddly rottweiler puppy who bites.

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