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August 25, 2005
Ads for Bots
There's been a bit of insightful discussion lately on the topic of advertisements for search engine spammers on well traveled sites. It started out with a post by Phil Ringalda complaining about untargeted ads on the O'Reilly sites. He contends that the ads were purchased solely to increase the advertiser's page rank scores and that this is a bad thing as it will lead to the advertisers being listed higher in search engine results than they warrant by his opinion.
Two days later Greg Yardley responded/weighed in, declaring that he is "not responsible for making Google better" and going on to explain why he/I/anyone who doesn't work for Google is free of that duty.
On the 23rd Tim O'Reilly himself responded to the criticism by explaining the motivation behind offering the ads and the process used to filter which advertisers his network accepts.
I would posit that if a site has decided to sell advertising they are agreeing to offer visibility and links to any advertisers in exchange for payment. Trying to manage the target market that the advertiser chooses is an inappropriate attempt to exert control over another business, assuming they're not advertising illegal services or goods. If the advertiser is targeting search engine 'bots in an attempt to raise their page rank score, good for them. If they're targeting mid-20's technophiles, good for them. So long as the ads don't radically impact user experience (which is to say that the color schemes must match with the hosting site) why would anyone care what the target audience is?
O'Reilly is afraid that having ads that don't relate directly to the content of an article or site will detract from the user experience. Well I've got news for Tim, all ads, even those that are perfectly on topic, detract from the end user experience. If someone is looking for goods or services, they'll go to a site that offers those, if someone is looking for content they'll go to a content site. Mixing the two is a way to support free content by degrading the user experience in the hopes of increasing a good or service's visibility. Advertisements never ad value to a page's content, ever (unless you're the J. Peterman company, but then they went out of business didn't they?).
Finally, these ads work as a form of arbitrage against the big advertising networks. They will force those networks to lower their prices, or allow individuals like O'Reilly to increase the amount he charges per ad, until the market stabilizes. They force the search engines to improve their results. They allow users free access to content and reward popular content producers for their work. Bloggers need to internalize the reasons why they're offering paid advertising services or else their own conflicts of interest will lead to self-recriminations and name calling, otherwise we all (unless you're a Google stockholder) benefit from this type of arbitrage.
Posted by ashusta at August 25, 2005 10:14 AM