Friday, February 04, 2005

Had by an Ad!

In order to study the true blog experience, I signed up yesterday for AdSense – a Google service which puts real live ads on my little Blog. I hope this won’t offend anyone – this is an entrepreneurial blog, after all!

AdSense puts ads on my website for free; the advertisers pay only if someone actually clicks on their ad. (And there were dire warnings when I signed up about what they’ll do to me should I attempt to click on the ads on my own site, in an effort to earn the penny or whatever that that might be worth).

Right now, the ads appear in a very ugly space, way down at the bottom of this blog, which means no one will likely ever see them anyway, so I will put off buying the Porsche for a while.

Why am I writing about this? Because of how spooky this process is. When I scrolled down the page tonight to view my Site Meter (which lets you check your site traffic), I noticed that all the ads were about Star Trek products. Obviously, that’s because the very next post below (my most recent post) was about the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise, which was announced today. In some scarily efficient super-computer way, AdSense notices what I write and serves up ads based on the copy I post!

The mind boggles. What if I write about the pharmaceutical industry? What kind of ads will they serve up if I discuss plastic surgery, or food additives, or dating? What if I mentioned one of those smarmy “get-rich-on-the-Internet” gurus, such as Cor – no, I won’t mention his name. Not till I check with my lawyer.

I may cancel AdSense if it continues to take me out of context and turn my words of wisdom into promotional sales copy for ridiculously marginal products. But for now, it’s all part of the learning experience.

No comments: