I got an ad job today says:

I don’t see any of that ad crap with my ad block installed which has had 64 million downloads. How is it that you are not a part of that 64 million?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Troublemaker says:

Don’t really get the point of this article.

Serious says:

Good catch Cherman. I see this happen quite often.. more so on digg.com. Although yes, ad-block is a great addition if you want to avoid seeing the ads, but i prefer seeing them so that the host make some money off of their products.

Mr.Fusion – you obviously don’t know marketing and PR.. most news content is written by PR agencies; i have hired several PR agencies to create “news” for some of my clients… and in addition advertise on the same page in the newspaper. This is quite common. You really do like to bash a lot on dvorak’s blog. I hardly see anything positive posted by you.

Awake says:

Obviously Chernan has no clue as to how Internet advertising works these days. Given how technically primitive this blog is, I’m not surprised by the ignorance.

On modern websites the ads are automatically matched to page content. When the page is sent to you, it is simultaneously sent to the adserver, which analyzes the content and matches any ads that it may have in its directory to what is being presented to the reader.

So if there is an article on cars, you may get an ad for Ford; if there is an article on gold, you may get an ad for gold coins, and if there is a movie review, you may get an ad for the movie.

Refreshing the page often presents you with an ad for something completely different although the main page content is the same.

If you frequent political blogs you often see quite ironic ads, like an article might mention what a rube Sarah Palin really is, and on the same page you may get an ad for “Support Sarah Palin and her values”

The OP is showing his ignorance.

pedro says:

#11 Aaaahahahahahaha. You have just been upgraded from conFused to severely senile. Your new status perks will arrive in the mail shortly.

Serious says:

#11. Mr Fusion – no it wasn’t Fox News.. it was several newspapers not news channels (but from my knowledge it works the same way).. both liberal and conservative, they are all for sale, so are websites. Example would be CNN, immediately after covering Copenhagen AGW opening speech, a strategically placed ad for alternative energy appeared. Fox news (yes, I know you like to bash them) you might hear about someone rant up Gold.. and immediately afterwards you see a gold commercial, telling you how to invest and buy Gold. Example: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-december-10-2009/beck—not-so-mellow-gold (you might want to note that the increased Gold price has more to do with the fall of the USD in 40% value towards many other currencies)

If you read about any sort of product in a newspaper, most likely it is written by a PR agency.. if you read about some market research analysis being done, most probably there is a big corporation sponsoring it to make their company look better. Microsoft does this all the time.. so does Apple.. that is how the PR world works. I don’t know of a single large company that does not dabble in placed news articles through PR agencies.. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I’ve worked with PR agencies and done marketing for years. For events, PR agencies will often invite press to press events, where they are given pre-coverage articles, talking points etc.. on how to cover the event and what to write.. often news outlets are specifically chosen and advertisement spots are ‘bought’ to make the reporter write favorably about the event etc.. if they don’t, advertisement money will be pulled and the news outlets loses its income. This is standard across all outlets regardless of what political view it has.

You also made a false assumption that I read these newspapers myself..

Corporations and newspapers work closely together through PR agencies, as PR agencies are a great source for revenue flow for newspapers.. newspapers, as news channels, as websites survive on their advertising dollars most of the time – and you can be pretty darn sure they do what i wrote above. I have yet to find any major outlet deny money in exchanged for placed articles, unless they have a competing firm with them.

I also have a degree in IT and as #10 said, yes many systems work this way, but many systems also allow for special placement of ads with specific articles; I created such a system myself and having a system that doesn’t do this, would mean corporate suicide. You want to give your incoming money the most flexibility as possible and denying the possibility of linked advertisement would be stupid. You might also note how Dvorak’s blog advertisement on left hand side promotes EarthShare..

Doggy Woof Muncher says:

At least the ads are better than that damn “a housewife invented a tooth whitening system that ***REALLY WORKS*** ” that regularly appear on this blog.
Not only was there NO housewife, but the companies now promoting their crap by using that add are under investigation for hijacking the ad-copy from the original advertiser (who DIDN’T have a product that worked anyway). boingboing.net/2009/11/20/google-puts-a-stop-t.html

In fact this single ad on dvorak.org was one of the big reasons I installed AdBlockPlus.

Advertising may have helped pay for much of the content that we now all take for granted, but now its killing the internet!

Greg Allen says:

This blog entry needs a BS meter.

My local paper runs positive reviews of movies AND ads for those same movies. Every paper does that.

Sometimes, of course, it runs bad reviews, too.

Serious says:

#17 Reganvelter: lol.. yes google ads work often on content, browser cookies and flash cookies + history in order to give you targeted advertisement. As they don’t control the content they need to advertise according to your history, especially if their spiders have yet to crawl the content of the page.