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.
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
I tell ya, you don't get no respect.
Not just from advertisers, but from Gawker, who won't even put you in their bug.
Consumerist predates Valleywag, right? They added Valleywag to the bottom line of the bug, where there's plenty of room to list Consumerist, but NOOOOOO!
Well, excuuuuuuse ME! (I don't mix metaphors, I mix comedians.)
...Am I stirring up trouble yet?