EDITORS BLOG
Of offensive ads and revenues
A Mr Jones of Runcon writes:
Are Toffee web skint? answer yes. how do i now you have Redshite adverts on your website. I am totally disscusted you will be selling there shirts and tickets next.
We get similarly indignant emails about this every now and then so it's worth addressing once and for all.
The adverts served by Google are context-sensitive — in other words, they are served based on the textual content of our site, hence the ads for football-related apparel and paraphernalia, toffee and related confectionary, and the occasional plug for merchandise related to rival football clubs, including, of course, Liverpool FC.
We don't knowingly display those ads. Other than to not have Google ads on the site at all, we have no control over these ads until we see them or they are reported to us. If we have the URL of the offending advertiser, we can add them to the growing list of sites that are filtered out of the rotation of ads that are served to our pages, but we aren't able to pre-empt the appearance of such ads on the site.
So, if you see one of these ads and are suitably offended, then please take a note of the URL and let us know through the Feedback page. Or you could just ignore it — or better yet, click the link — and be content in the knowledge that ToffeeWeb is earning a few cents off the RS.
Google ads, as our primary revenue generator, help us keep the site going and allow us to upgrade our hosting platform to cope with the demands on resources created by the various reader-generated facilties we've been adding over the years.
Regular visitors during busy periods will no doubt have encountered those annoying "Service Unavailable" errors and it's these problems caused by load on the database servers that will, in all likelihood, force us to again upgrade our hosting plan, a move which, given the falling ad revenues as the global economy tanks, would put ToffeeWeb into the red and then we, as a site, would be skint.
So, yes, the ads are annoying and we'd love to not have them but they allow us to not only keep this behemoth alive but keep improving it in the name of Nil Satis Nisi Optimum.
Lyndon Lloyd Posted 12/02/2009 at 02:53:47
Reader Comments
Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer
There are no responses so far to this article. Be the first to offer a comment using the form below.
Add Your Comments
In order to post a comment to the Editors' Blog, you need to be logged in as a registered user of the site.
Or Sign up as a ToffeeWeb Member — it's free, takes just a few minutes and will allow you to post your comments on articles and MailBag submissions across the site.