This Blog : Not for Sale

When it comes to walling off a blog’s content from the influence of advertisers, I’m in favor of editorial independence. I don’t believe that the presence (or absence) of ads on a blog should have any influence on the author’s content. To people on the marketing side of the business, it might seem that if it were up to journalists/bloggers, there wouldn’t be any advertising on our pages at all. This is simply not true. As bloggers, most of us don’t earn enough to support ourselves by doing what we do, but paid ads do help us to pay for our hosting and ISP costs. For marketers, it often seems like the only thing that matters is money. They don’t seem to understand that it’s content that attracts readers in the first place. Having editorial independence over the content of my own blog means that I am free to keep providing the kind of content my readers have come to expect. If readers begin to feel that my blog content can be bought and sold, I’ll lose credibility and they’ll surf elsewhere.

Google’s AdSense program serves up ads that are contextually relevant (most of the time) by scanning through a page’s content and matching keywords and phrases to advertisers. Much of the time, AdSense is a non-intrusive form of serving up ads… they appear in a sidebar or banner. However, some new ad models are appearing that aren’t nearly so benign. Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT technology highlights commercial text links from keywords appearing within pages of online content. Through a javascript embedded in a page, the keywords found in the content are hyperlinked to the advertiser’s target page. It directly affects the content of an entry by creating links within the content to ad pages, and the blogger has no control over which keywords or links are created. This is not a good idea because it mixes those links in with the relevant links a blogger is trying to point readers to for more information about their content. I think eventually it might also tend to influence what a blogger blogs about. They might, for example, try to target specific advertisers through keywords in order to get paid more for those click-throughs. If someone’s paying you, it’s very difficult to be objective about the whole thing, especially if you can easily figure out ways to maximize your ad revenue. I think it crosses the line between independent content and advertising, kind of like turning blogs into infomercials. I also think it brings into question a blogger’s credibility. What do you think?