Ballookey

I don’t even remember what this blog post by Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, is about anymore. I just got livid with one of the first sentences:

I don’t agree with everything therein; you can’t judge a site by its ads, for one thing.

You better fucking believe I’m judging every site I visit by their ads. Just like the rest of the content, the site owner made a decision about what ad network or web advertising company they were going to work with to put things on their web pages.

I buy tons of magazines in all different categories for my job and rarely, RARELY, do ads cross over from fashion magazines to lifestyle, tattoo, music, art, etc… Each genre of magazine has it’s lineup of usual suspects, but I’ll never see the same ads found in urban hip-hop lifestyle magazines in automobile magazines. I’m never going to see the same ads in Vanity Fair and Inked.

And there’s a reason for that! The people reading one magazine have different interests from those reading another. Readers of certain magazines would be offended by some of the ads in magazines targeting different lifestyles. Even if the ad itself isn’t offensive, the very look and feel would make the readers pause and say “who do you think I AM?”

That’s why I’m entirely justified in judging a site by its ads. The site owner thinks I want to see this. Or they’ve hooked their cart up to an ad network that thinks I want to see this. If their judgment is poor in that regard, that taints my evaluation of their judgement as applied to any topic they’re covering.

THEY MADE A CHOICE. No one put a knife to their throat and said, run this ad or else! Sure, you don’t get fine-grained control over each individual ad in a network, but if it’s the wrong network for your site, then all the ads are going to stick out like a sore thumb and be annoying to your audience. If it’s the right network and one ad just happens to be a little off-topic for your audience, the worst that will happen is they don’t notice.

I wish people would take web advertising more seriously. The fact that site owners and chief contributors seem not to give a shit what appears under their masthead and alongside their name goes a long way in justifying potential advertisers’ perception of web advertising as not valuable.