Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Thursday, April 24, 2008 Religious Contextual Ads  Sometimes contextual ads can reveal interesting facts about a site and its visitors. For some time I have noticed that Google Adsense has been displaying a certain banner for a site targeting Muslims seeking marriage partners. Personally I don't mind religious ads on my site. It's all about business. I consider myself an agnostic (as in, I can not with certainty prove or disprove the existence of god or the validity of any religion,) but I have a liberal view towards faith. People should be free to choose whatever creed works for them as long as they don't force it on others. I don't know what algorithm Google employs in targeting Adsense ads, but I must assume they strive to maximize click-through rates. It's possible that many of my site's visitors are Muslims (or Moslems, as Persians pronounce it), or perhaps my middle-eastern last name, Hashemian, triggers these banners. My bet is on the latter. To the algorithm, I'm just an unknown visitor from the U.S. who happens to be visiting the site. At any rate, there must be some religious profiling at work here. I haven't seen any Christian or Jewish or Hindu-oriented ads on my site. Certainly I haven't seen anything for matching Agnostics or Atheists. If the site helps two Muslims find each other and become a couple, that's cool with me. But if the marriage produces a male child (or female, for that matter,) I only hope they resist the temptation to have their child genitally mutilated, or in euphemistic term, circumcised. islam,agnosticism,atheism,marriage,dating,circumcision,persia,iran,adsense Labels: adsense, religion, social <Religious Contextual Ads> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, April 06, 2008 Political Contextual Advertising  When a site like this one makes the decision to put up advertising from ad networks such as Google Adsense, it loses some capacity to make a quick first impression. Years ago when the fears of Indian outsourcing was at its peak and people in the U.S. were terrified of job losses, a company put up a Web site in defense of the American workers. When the company decided to monetize the site via Adsense, it was horrified to find out that most of the ads were touting outsourcing to countries such as India and Philippines. In other words the contextual ads were conveying a message opposite of the site's intended one and some users faced with those ads probably regarded the site as pro-outsourcing. The image to the right is exactly about the same issue. Here is an ad by John McCain that has been coming up on this site for a few days now. It's quite possible that visitors to this site, upon seeing the ad, infer that this site is about politics or it's even pro-Republican. Yes, I am interested in politics, no, I'm not pro-Republican (certainly not in its neo-con incarnation), and right now I don't really have a strong opinion about McCain or any other potential candidates. I do consider most politicians as greedy hypocrites and I may indulge in a rare pro-liberal banter in my blog, but this site as a whole is politically neutral. Anyone from any camp is welcome here, yet I wonder how many visitors, seeing this ad, would actually make that distinction. mccain,politics,republicans,democrats,politicians,adsense Labels: adsense, politics <Political Contextual Advertising> // posted by rh 1 comments Wednesday, March 26, 2008 eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well  It was bound to happen. A few days ago I (and surely many other eBay affiliates) received an email from eBay announcing the unveiling of their very own affiliate site (dubbed eBay Partner Network) and their April 1st departure from Commission Junction, a ValueClick company. May 1st is the final cut-off date for the affiliates to complete the migration. That means many sites like this one will be busy porting their application over to the new eBay platform. That is specially true of sites (again, like this one) that leverage eBay Developer API's to search and display relevant eBay items on their pages. While I'm sure this is sad news for Commission Junction and ValueClick, I wonder what took eBay so long. This is a company with vast resources and talent and hardly in need of a middle-man company to handle their affiliate transactions. While eBay has been lurching, companies like Google and Amazon have gone on to produce numerous services geared towards affiliates and developers and have reaped the rewards. As for the affiliates both offer solid in-house products in the forms of Adsesne (Google) and Amazon Associates. Perhaps eBay's stalling is indicative of some internal synergy problems coupled with some recent high profile departures. Thankfully for eBay, their core auction business seems to have remained intact and it would provide a solid platform to launch some of these new initiatives. We'll see if eBay can finally catch up with the rest of the titans. Meanwhile many of us will be busy migrating our little affiliate sections to this new platform. More info on affiliates.ebay.com. ebay,amazon,google,adsense,affiliate programs,commission junction Labels: adsense, amazon, ebay, google <eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well> // posted by rh 1 comments

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