I just saw a National Rifle Association ad on BMG. It offers a free knife (think “guns don’t kill people” — cute) to people who join.
This both angers and saddens me. We just marked the second anniversary of Sandy Hook. 83 people in America die of gunshot wounds every day. I say BMG shouldn’t take money to promote this despicable, politically retrograde organization. BMG doesn’t need the NRA’s blood money. What do you all think?
Please share widely!
ryepower12 says
Don’t have much, if any, control over the ads that appear on their website.
If you see an ad you don’t like on a blog you read, instead of getting all upset over it and wasting time writing a diary, I suggest you click on it a bunch of times. It costs the organization you don’t like money, and earns the blog you do like money.
jshore says
Reminds me of the pre internet days when people used to send bricks back to advertisers who included postage paid envelopes. Clicking to support BMG is a good reason I wouldn’t mind getting carpal tunnel finger to support, but will clicking a certain ad a number of times generate the same type of ads, popping up on the site?
SomervilleTom says
There are “click generator” browser plugins that might be the equivalent of a snail-mail brick. They have a legitimate purpose for testing, so they’re not “malware” per se.
Seems like flooding the add with a few thousand clicks in a minute or so might be a way to help Google find a way to block such ads.
David says
if Google thinks we’re abusing the ad system, they can kick us out.
chris-rich says
I’m hilariously familiar with their system as an intensive user.
The ad serves just respond to patterns from a particular users surfing habits. If it notices a user is interested in guns, it serves gun stuff.
It can’t tell if you like or hate guns, it just sorts to respond to a pattern.
I provided a primer on how to make it serve you something else below.
It’s still serving me jewelry ads and now a goofy homeowner refi pitch is in the mix.
David says
Got plumbing ads on BMG for weeks. 😀
Christopher says
I don’t think my BMG ads reflect my search habits – usually they match the topic of discussion, but without knowing the context. For example there could be a post here during election season about how awful Charlie Baker is and his name is used to generate ads FOR his candidacy. Right now I’m seeing two ads from Comcast/Xfinity. When I order online from Dominos, their ads seem to be all I see until I clear out the history.
centralmassdad says
If not for the awful pizza, then for the odious politics of the guy who owns it.
Christopher says
…and they are definitely most convenient for me. I don’t know why it seems every pizza chain owner is conservative.
centralmassdad says
with ketchup and rubber cheese.
Ack.
There’s no accounting for taste.
johntmay says
It’s a great way to externalize costs.
They pay people peanuts to use their time and vehicles.
Christopher says
n/t
chris-rich says
And some times there are delays. The advertisers nag you about that obscure furnace part you bought.
Now it’s selling Xfinity cards, an electric car, (I don’t drive) and some mighty flashy ruby red brassieres from Fredericks of Bayonne .
The ability to reflexively ignore these things is a skill worth acquiring. It generally looks like desktop users like me are now in some pleasing ad backwater as ad shills rush to maintain their pitch pummeling over in mobile land.
This whole data driven ad era is probably showing ad buyers how ineffectual it all is.
Christopher says
Usually the Google ads pop up based on what is being discussed and there has not been discussion of gun issues here lately. That said, I would favor a model of directly selling ad space to campaigns and causes we like rather than relying on Google.
David says
is far less reliable in terms of a steady revenue stream than are Google ads. We simply do not have the resources to market ourselves to potential advertisers – it’s a sales job, like any other. We do have space for blogads, which are basically the model you describe; that space has been vacant for a long time.
David says
the NRA ad you describe – which I agree is jarring – is part of a Google ad campaign. Neither we nor any other website that runs Google ads has direct control over what ads appear in the space; it’s a function of which advertisers are interested in advertising via Google, and what keywords appear on the particular website. My guess is that since this is obviously a site about politics, politically-themed ads like the NRA ad show up.
The sad truth, as I mentioned in reply to Christopher upthread, is that Google ads are by far the most reliable source of revenue we have, and we do have to pay our hosting bill every month to keep this site online. You can help reduce our dependence on advertising by subscribing.
SomervilleTom says
Google is able to block adult-themed ads. Google is arguably better than any other ad provider at filtering objectionable advertising content, because of its extraordinary search and filtering capabilities.
While it is certainly true that BMG has no direct control over these ads, it is also true that informing Google in no uncertain terms that this community finds these ads obscene is possible.
I think it’s worth exploring, with Google, the possibility of providing “black lists” of advertisers that this site wishes to block. I thought Google had that capability some years ago when I was managing similar sites.
jconway says
For those of us who cannot afford to subscribe for the time being, that option is free, wastes the NRAs money and gives BMG money. To the extent that the NRA is paying BMG via google, it is a dollar not spent on lobbying and spent instead on progressives like us!
chris-rich says
Ads also can be a reflection of user surfing patterns in odd dumb ways. So something the user clicked led the algorithm to think an NRA ad would be a good bet.
I’m looking at jewelry ads here now in the lower right, probably because I gave some woman in my Google plus following a plus 1 for a jewelry post, (mainly to acknowledge her interest, I actually could care less about jewelry).
I call it nagvertising.
But I’d be careful about over clicking the things as it could hose David by sending a signal that someone is gaming the system.
I never see NRA ads but then, the only gun related things I ever look at are gun tragedy disasters in news and the pattern probably suggests I’m not a gun fan.
The real way to enhance ad revenue is to make sure the site is well optimized for mobile where all the ad money is heading anyway.
What you really want to do is to flush the NRA cue by spending 15 minutes pricing a plumbing part at Granger or checking out Camera prices at Amazon, etc. If it looks like you are nearing a purchase, it’ll go nuts.
Trickle up says
without giving back.
Take from it specific knowledge of what the NRA is up to, what rhetorical arrows are in their quiver.
Click the link if you like to siphon a small mote of money from them to BMG.
Give nothing back, not even a moment of care.
Peter Porcupine says
I never saw such an ad; the ones on MY sidebar right now are to seek out health insurance, a ‘free’ smart phone, and mail-order cosmetics.
I might have liked a free knife.
Christopher says
Now I have the NRA ad for a free knife on my sidebar!
chris-rich says
I’m pricing and researching the things so I’ll give David the click through when I look further.
That’s probably the best way to help David, do a bit of research about a purchase you’re going to make anyway and when it shows up here, make it your click through point.
That’s completely legit and a cool way to make the ad stream behave itself.
fenway49 says
State Farm, give your loved one a Honda for Christmas (twice), and Brooks Brothers, none of which have anything to do with any online activity. Guess they just know I’m classy like that.
bluewatch says
Here’s how I see this situation. When an NRA ad appears on BMG, the NRA is spending its money poorly. At the same time, BMG is making money. So, I think it’s great that NRA money is being siphoned, In a very small way, to people who oppose the NRA.
After all, I would like to see the NRA fail and BMG succeed. So, when I see an NRA ad on the BMG blog, I “click through”. The clicks help BMG and cost the NRA.
SomervilleTom says
I use firefox with the “Adblock Plus” (v2.6.6) plugin. I get no ads at all.
David says
I do use them on many sites. However, I disable them for BMG, because the more ads are displayed here, the more money we make. So if you’d like to make a small contribution to BMG, I’d respectfully suggest that you might disable your ad blocker for this site. Our ads are not nearly as annoying as those on many other sites. Thanks!
chris-rich says
It’s just another data point.
After all there is no free lunch and I don’t find it much of a challenge to ignore them.
And maybe my use of chrome is what allows me to manipulate served ads so easily. It’s like working with the system flow.
I’m also utterly public. I have no privacy fears as the only thing you really discover from ditching privacy fears is that no one really gave two shits about you in the first place, which I find quite liberating.
SomervilleTom says
The much-publicized NSA programs are not nearly as sophisticated as the industry-funded technology collects and mines your on-line behavior.
Once your private information is in the hands of others, you have zero insight into who has it and for what purposes. It goes well beyond what sites you visit and how long you stay there (although even that is more revealing than you might think). Metadata, in particular — time patterns, geographic locations, correlations between your search activity and where you are or when your search — can reveal astonishing personal information.
Identity theft is just one of a host of risks that we all face. One analogy is the ultimately false assumption made by the genetic research community that genetic sequences could be “scrubbed” of personal data and then published without fear of the donor being identified. Several organizations have falsified this, showing that variant data can be used to identify at least some specific individuals. This is of particular concern in the IVF community. Offspring of donors are, in fact, in at least some cases able to identify and then contact the sperm donor from whom they were conceived. This can have far-reaching implications — legal, financial, medical, and so on.
The same statistical techniques used to identify sperm donors from genetic sequences and variant data are also very effective at distilling personal information from internet usage patterns combined with internet databases. This is an area of active research, and these tools will only get more powerful.
chris-rich says
Those are all valuable and valid points for those with something to lose. And it is a very well made summary of hazards.
But I further undermine attempts to get something out of me by being utterly worthless.
I don’t own a credit card and never will. I don’t have significant amounts of money and am deliberately poor. My net worth is probably less than 2k.
And I have very few online transactions because I don’t buy stuff other than food very often and then I exclusively use Amazon.
It’s pretty cool. I barter rent space for work as a building super. I don’t own a car. When you remove these big ticket money sucking things from the equation, you are at the margin of a money economy. No booze and no cigarettes neither.
I’m an aging single guy, a determined loser, really, with no family to compromise, my parents are gone. Each day is a gift to savor and if I make it to 65, it’ll surprise me.
SomervilleTom says
When you comment on a high-visibility blog like this, you implicitly advocate your positions to those who read your commentary.
I appreciate your clarification. Perhaps, for you, there really is no significant downside. For the overwhelming majority of those who read your comments, that is simply not true. Your argument turns into the classic “I have nothing to hide, so why do I care if I am searched?”
Today, you are able live “at the margins” and work as a building super. The privacy you assume by those choices exists because you are allowed to live at the margins and allowed to do the work you choose. There are those in society, even today’s society, who would restrict even those choices given the opportunity.
I can well imagine a city or state who says “allowing undocumented individuals to manage buildings is a security risk. They might allow terrorists to hold clandestine meetings in their building. They allow illegal immigrants and drug dealers to use their building. Etc etc etc”.
The freedoms, constitutional protections, and privacy that you so blithely dismiss were won and have been preserved at great cost. You benefit from them, even if you are unwilling to admit it.
In my view, you do an injustice to everyone by implicitly suggesting that the choices you’ve made are viable for others. Worse, you advocate a posture that would be disastrous to society if a significant number of people chose to adopt it.
I’ve made my livelihood from technology for forty years. I hope to continue for at least another ten. I welcome the benefits that accrue from the vast amount of data available to each of us. In my view, we have a corresponding obligation to be responsible and careful about how we manage the risks.
In my view, the threats to our privacy affect EVERYONE — even those who, apparently like you, choose to ignore them.
chris-rich says
But I wasn’t planning on selling it to anyone else. You appeared to wonder why I don’t care so I told you.
I’d be the first to agree it would be pretty ridiculous for most people, so you are safe there. I generally assume others aren’t me, and that’s fine. Would the assumption was more prevalent as it would save nervous people a lot of time now given to agonizing implausible consequences for others they don’t know or imagine.
And the idea that my opinion is some menacing radioactive thing that will surely convince many other people to dive into such folly is tinged with a bit of falling sky.
If anything, I’m more likely to be held up as an object of ridicule which is fine when one has no delusions of significance.
I wish I could believe more fervently in the menace of it all and I’ll surely squawk loudly if it ever actually does bite me in the ass.
But life is pretty bitchin when you don’t have credentials to uphold, don’t work for nosy pests and don’t care about getting more than you need while living on the cheap.
One could also argue that the blog isn’t that busy, (David has numbers), nor are the various brain farts that bedeck it likely to be guiding lights for any reasonably alert person’s life anytime soon.
Hell, my own google plus page has had more than 3 and a half million visits since I revved it up last year so I know a thing or two about web content and numbers.
I live in a building my friend inherited and he’s pretty thrilled to have someone to handle the tenants and contractors in return for a bit of space so I won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
And I’m working with Cambridge City people about another tenant problem, so it isn’t like there are official sanctions. The law sez that a person can live in a non residential space if the property owner agrees.
The main restriction is that a landlord can’t charge residential rates for commercial spaces.
At this point the officials are more concerned about reducing homelessness than they are about criminalizing unconventional living situations.
I hope it helps or at least provides options for new scolding variations.
It almost has the contours of a classic GOP Irresponsibility Finger Wag that is the operating basis for many of their stupid pet tricks from pointless ebola scares to the importance of deifying police.
The kind of liberal I aspire to be tends to prefer a confidence based outlook.
stomv says