Advertorialisation

One of the great joys of using a free blogging service is that one’s own artfully created and meticulously authored content is randomly recontextualised by whatever eye-wateringly awful adware is sprayed willy nilly across the top of the screen by the good people at blogspot (henceforth known as google).

So far so inevitable, and anyway as Camille Paglia once said “adverts are the best thing on television” — well they have the highest per-second costs anyway, which must mean something — or other — and at the very least it means that someone professional has been involved in making this blog page.

But it has been pointed out to me — several times, and at great length, by John Eden — that these blinking pixellated commercials are not random. Not at all, at all. Which means that the ad server looks at what you’re writing about, checks the word-hits against the list associated with their advertisers (I presume this is a meta tag forwarded by Double-Click, but who knows? Maybe it’s hand typed by Tibetan monks), and serves up a delightfully, nay refreshingly, targeted set of commercial messages to a doubtless grateful readership.

So on the one hand, blissblog is saturated with ads for music websites, record stores, and magazines aimed at “a certain type of not quite so young man”, therefore confirming Reybolds’ position as an arbiter of taste among the 30-something wannabe music nerd market (market? I suspect it’s actually a condition, given my personal experience, but we’ll let that pass). In contrast, my own modest excuse for a blog seems to promote little but minor hotels dedicated to the landscape alignments and earth mysteries massive, which is great, I feel like we’re collectively rendering a service to circle spotters.

Meanwhile, I am perturbed to note that John Eden’s site is surrounded by advertisements for sexual prosthetics, vacuum pumps and the bafflingly titled “corrective cosmetic surgery” — I assume this is not a new service offered by Angel Stern but rather a refuge for theover-enthusiastically pierced. Of course, it’s always possible Eden’s been on the blower pimping his own tight little blog, commercial whirlwind that he is.

Nevertheless, I do wonder what you could do with some creative meta-, or perhaps that should be under-, tagging, achieved through adjusting the content of your blog. Let’s try:

RUSH LIMBAUGH
OLLY NORTH
GUNS’N’AMMO
GEORGE GILDER

combined with

SATAN’S SLAVES
EVIL MOTHERS
INVESTMENT PLAN

I will be watching my banner with interest…

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