Should bloggers have control over ads that appear next to their content?

Via TheNextWeb.com: Should bloggers have control over ads that appear next to their content? Excerpt, then a comment:.

Given the collective bargaining power needed to amass ad dollars, many popular independent bloggers have handed over their sidebars and headers to large blog networks, trusting them to seek out advertisers in return for a percentage of revenue. The larger networks can sometimes contain hundreds of bloggers and sell access to their blogs as packaged deals, meaning a single ad will be displayed across dozens of blogs within a network. 

In most cases, this is ideal for the blogger because he can focus on creating content without having to waste time chasing down advertisers. 

But occasionally this can lead to an ad placement with which the blogger doesn’t agree, and this is when controversy erupts. 

Take, for instance, the Scienceblogs network, which faced a revolt from over a dozen of its own bloggers a few weeks ago when it decided to launch a corporate blog sponsored by Pepsi. 

The blog — since taken down — resembled all the other blogs on the network and was aggregated alongside them in its main news feed. Perhaps most outrageously, the corporate-penned posts were being indexed in Google News, which has a high bar of entry for what news sources it allows. 

The science bloggers were not happy that their journalistic integrity had been compromised so haphazardly. “The major problem wasn’t necessarily that an advertorial went up, it was that [Seed Media]” — the company that owns Scienceblogs — “didn’t give us any indication of what was going on,” Brian Switek told me in a phone interview. 

Switek is a science writer who left the network in protest of the Pepsi decision. “All of a sudden we have this new blog that’s entirely run by Pepsi staff and overseen by Pepsi with no editorial oversight from Scienceblogs.” 

For Switek, the incident chipped into the “general credibility that Scienceblogs has tried to create since its inception in terms of inviting people with great science writing with integrity who aren’t shills for certain companies.” 

He alleged that Seed knew ahead of time that its bloggers wouldn’t like the campaign, and that’s why it didn’t give any warning and ultimately was so slow to respond to the outrage. 

But despite this lack of transparency, the science blogger admired the fact that Seed didn’t attempt to censor any of the backlash. “For all my other criticisms, I really have to credit Seed with not editing any of the criticism, not taking it down, not telling us that we can’t make those comments.”

I followed this dispute with interest and some anxiety. I often think about putting Google ads on my sites, and then I think about what might turn up. So I chicken out and run only ads for some of my books, and for The Tyee, an online magazine that I contribute a lot to.

It really does boil down to credibility. My major blog is H5N1, on a subject about which I can't claim to be an expert. All I can do is choose sources and experts who do seem to have some credibility, and leave it at that. If ads for belly-fat reduction, or worse yet homeopathic bird-flu cures, started to pop up on my site, I'd cringe.

If I could control the ads (without spending all my time drumming up business), it might be different. But I can't, so I run only the ads you see here.

Comments

[Leigh Takata]

Whether or not bloggers have control to anything which is not ‘theirs’ is certainly an interesting debate and one that deserves some thought and/or exploration and I am glad that you thought of this as something to mention. I am currently a graduate student at Kennesaw State University, and as we have recently learned in reading Williams and Tollet’s The Non-Designer’s Web Book, websites (or in this case blogs) require lots of maintenance and upkeep, and there are always costs affiliated with doing so. Having the ability to have any control as to what goes up and what does not is sometimes crucial to the blog’s integrity as you have mentioned and gone into detail as to why as well.
Sometimes I have to wonder, however, if anyone even really looks at the ads. Obviously the people paying for the ad space are hoping that you do, or perhaps click on them by accident. I’m sure at one point or another we have all been guilty of accidently clicks on a banner ad or an ad that showed up on the side of Facebook. You probably also hope that someone might be interested in one of your books, but may or may not be disappointed because unlike someone who is simply paying for the ad space, you have control over the blog and the ads, which is something that is not always found these days. Still, finding ads that are at least somewhat related to the content is crucial, as you mentioned with the blog that was only advertising Pepsi, otherwise none of the visitors are ever going to be even remotely interested in venturing off into ad land when the ad might lead them to some place totally random and unexpected. I have certainly had an interesting experience in testing out ads for kicks on occasion and will try to find “The Best Deals on Designer Shoes” which turns out to be a broken link or a landing page for several lists of links to find the best deals on shoes, which was not quite what I was hoping for!
I also think that it is great you are able to control your ads and further promote yourself by doing so because you actually have stuff to sell (we will soon be reading your Writing for the Web book!), but it is important to realize that others are not always so lucky. Having to sift through the random ads that will appear when applying Google ads seems virtually impossible whereas having the option to decide what ads you run seems like the better route, but possibly not always an option. Perhaps the situation could be avoided altogether if bloggers were just to use arenas like blogspot or wordpress. While these are obviously not independent blogs, users can customize them to their liking and both sides of the blog appear ad free, making a question of integrity disappear but total ownership no longer becomes an option.
I think that in the grand scheme of things the option of having control should exist, but sometimes may come with the price tag of extra man hours, or being more selective as to what ads to run. If companies are not fortunate enough to be able to do so, then perhaps they should stick to free blogs until they are able to afford independence if questions of integrity are going to come into play. I have my own personal blog just for fun and am certainly happy with the features afforded to me by blogspot. I suppose, though, if I were to be interested in something slightly more sophisticated such as your own blog, I might be weighing several different options. Thank you for bringing the question of control to light, it has certainly given me much to think about.