Am I The Only One Uncomfortable With These Ads?

[cnltb]

Good sites have ads, that's a given. I have no problem with looking at ads on a good site, because it means that I don't have to pay to use this great site, but I'm not sure I like seeing this ad all day while perusing the Luthier's Corner.

I'll leave my the specifics of my personal beliefs out, but I'm the last person to be offended by nudity from either sex, but anyone with eyes and a brain can see the difference between nudity, and sexuality. I don't know if I would go as far as to say it "offends" me, but it does make me uncomfortable to have to see something like this on every site I go to these days. Sex only sells sex, and that's all I'm seeing here. And this isn't the only one I've seen, the "Snorg" ads (I believe that's the spelling) has somewhat racy adverts too, but their products are cute, at the very least.

My little sister comes to this site often, and while I wouldn't be daft enough to go as far as to say "You should take it down, blah blah blah-", I don't much like it, and I just thought I would throw my opinion out there. You can all get back to your lives now, thanks for reading.

I have no problem with these ads.
Not more than with any other ad.

 

[john turner]

I don't care if you're a 90-year-old gay man who only looks at woodworking websites--there is something about the content of what you view that triggers the ads. Google ads are targeted to exactly two things: the content of the pages where they appear, and your individual browsing history.

this is not entirely correct. google relies on advertisers to correctly classify themselves as to the categories appropriate to what goods and services they are advertising.

many advertisers abuse google's system and miscatagorize themselves on purpose, in order to get their ads the most exposure in the least amount of time. for example, this particular ad might not come about due to browsing habits at all, but rather the advertiser lying about their site/service having some music-related relevance.

this is often the case at election time in the u.s., where both main political parties officially abuse google's ad servers repeatedly in order to get their messages out - they don't care that they will be blocked, by the time google processes the complaints usually the elections are over.

we have a very narrow range of topicality we consider acceptable for ads we will post on talkbass (all having to do explicitly with music and music instrument -related products and services), but as i said, unless we report it to google when someone miscatagorizes themselves, google won't necessarily catch it. and we cannot report it if folks don't directly report the offensive ads to us.

if someone will pm me the url that this ad linked to, i'll pass it on to paul where he can then notify our google rep about it.

 

[john turner]

You would be incorrect. Anything I have bought or shopped for online has poped up in talkbass ads.
And if you think google isn't tracking you, then you don't know much about google.

a little preemptive cookie management on your own computer will go a long way toward minimizing/defeating this. many advertisers and online retailers rely on cookies to let them track individuals and their browsing habits. deleting or blocking those cookies is an easy way to remove the majority of these kinds of connections.

side note - cookies with the "talkbass.com" extension will not have -any- advertiser information in them, or anything else used by anyone else but tb. these cookies are to enable you to stay logged in on talkbass between browsing sessions - if you delete these you will log yourself out of talkbass on that particular computer, and if you block them you will be unable to log into talkbass.com.