Saturday, February 9, 2008

Get mad at something important ...

There are plenty of things to get mad about out there. The ads you see on other folks' blogs ain't it. Aravosis explains:

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1. Most of the ads that you see on this blog, and most sites on the Web, are randomly generated by the ad companies we use. Advertisers buy run-of-network ads that run on thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Web sites at once, often randomly. Not only does the advertiser have no idea what site their ads are running on, but the sites have no idea what ads are coming (you may recall Obama recently having an ad on Drudge or something, this is what happened). In our case, Google tries to hone in which ads match our content, and they often see us talking about politics. So they send us political ads. Unfortunately, computers are dumb, so the political ads we get are sometimes Republican ads. So that's why you see ads you don't like on this, or any other, site.

2. I like to think that our readers are a step above the rest. Any of you who are going to suddenly turn into a conservative Republican because you accidentally saw an Ann Coulter ad on this Web site, well, I'm not sure we have a single reader who's that dumb.

3. Here's our ad policy. It's the same as Markos'. It's the same as The Nation. In a nutshell, we'll accept advertising from anyone, in principle. As Markos has clearly stated, if he starts cherry-picking which ads he deletes then it means he's endorsing the ads that remain. And I am not going to start endorsing every advertiser on this site. The advertising is separate from the editorial, period.

4. Having said that, I do block some ads sometimes. I'm certainly not going to take racist ads, bigoted ads, sex ads, or the like. But I am not going to get into the business of trying to decide whether 51% of you like the advertiser, which company is in favor or not this week, etc. It's just not going to happen, we have bigger and better things to focus on, all of us.

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I don't do ads here because I have my own principles (not saying people who do don't have principles) and for the same reason John had to spell this out. Give bloggers who have ads running on their pages a break. Running a blog (even a little shitty one like this) is a pain in the ass and takes up a lot of time. Get mad about stuff that's important.

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