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October 9th, 2007

Advertising on the internet

advertising

Kester posted an interesting post yesterday about online advertising and how it is a bad thing as it is the poor who lose out. See also his Facebook group ‘I’d Rather Pay For Facebook Than Put Up With All The Dumb Ads‘ and this previous post Advertising Makes Us All Poor.

I’d like to agree with him. I get so annoyed by adverts sometimes that steam comes out of my quite literal ears (in a metaphorical way). TV adverts annoy me the most. I try to keep a mental list of companies I will not buy from because their adverts are so annoying. Fortunately for these companies I am not good at mental lists.

But on the other hand if there were no advertising I am worried that the world would stop turning. There would be no newspapers and probably in an indirect way no CartoonChurch.com. There would be knock on effects you see.

The adverts here on the site don’t make a huge amount of money, but they are better than nothing. I do not see them as a great evil – if I were to rank all the evils I can think of they would be in the lower divisions, somewhere near people who put their feet on the chair in front and joggle inadvertently.

I tend to think that Google Adsense (the system I use here) is the most acceptable form of advertising as it is mainly used by small businesses and bizarre religious groups rather than large multinationals.

I don’t know – what do you think?

11 Comments »



This is a single Cartoon Blog entry, posted by Dave on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 10:38 am.

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11 Responses to “Advertising on the internet”


  1. John says:

    We bought a digital video recorder about a year ago and now I never see tv ads. We set it to record anything we watch (which is very easy to do) and skip over the adverts with two 120 second jumps in the recording.

    When I visited Anglia Television earlier this year I asked whether I was morally obliged to watch the adverts if I watched ITV. They assured me that I didn’t have to. Though, I do still have a niggling doubt about whether I am doing something wrong.

    Of course, this is in no way an advert for the HUMAX DUOVISIO PVR9200T TWIN TUNER FREEVIEW PERSONAL VIDEO RECORDER (available online or from electrical retailers near you)

    October 9th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
  2. Ann says:

    Sometimes I find the ads attached to your site quite entertaining – so delightfully whacko. Same with the ads when I use gmail – love seeing what some computer thinks I will interested in buying or knowing. Ads do not entice me – as I am not much of a buyer – the only one that is attracting me at the moment is the new iPod one.

    October 9th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
  3. Jon Howard says:

    (Warning: a general rant follows – it’s nothing personal!)

    As a Christian working in advertising, I do get fed up with the knee jerk reaction of other Christians and the church in general, that positions advertising as the source of all that is wrong with the world (somewhere below people trafficing on the list of acceptable jobs to do). And by implication suggesting that everyone who works in advertising is destined for some lower pit of hell alongside Hitler and Stalin.

    Get some perspective guys. Yes, there’s bad ads, misleading ads, dishonest ads, annoying ads, inappropriate ads, ads that appear at the wrong times and in the wrong places etc. And I do often struggle with my chosen career (equally, because it’s a difficult environment in which to be a Christian, you don’t half stand out – missionary fields and all that).

    But this is true of pretty much EVERYTHING in the Western world we live in (yes, I know, be salt and light, don’t follow the world’s rules etc. etc.). Try replacing ‘ads’ with ’sermon’ or ‘evangelistic outreach event’ or ‘worship song/hymn (delete as appropriate)’…or maybe ‘green grocers’ and ‘plumbers’…in the above sentance and see what I mean.

    The fact is that ‘advertising’ is not a stand alone ‘thing’ that somehow exists separate from the rest of the world, and can therefore be rejected as such. It is but a servant of the companies which produce the products and offer the service that we enjoy on a day to day basis.

    So if we want to diss and reject advertising, we pretty much have to do the same for anyone who makes/sells anything. Unless of course we want to return to an artisan bartering economy (which I guess has its appeal).

    No advertising means no iPod, car, TV, newspaper, chocolate, beer, PC, blog (please insert all those things you can’t live without here). And not because we only buy these things BECAUSE of advertising. But because they are all part and parcel of the same world of production, marketing and sales. If we want ’stuff’, advertising is the price we pay.

    And I would close by saying that, in my experience, most of the Christians who moan about advertising are happy to be buy ’stuff’ themselves – hmmm, maybe it’s only ‘other people’ that advertising leads astray (in good Christian partonising fashion). And often these people have jobs that are contributing to the consumerist society they reject just as much as I am (albeit in a less public fashion).

    Actually, to really close, I will just add that if advertising did wield as much power as people think it does (as maybe this was the case back in the 1950s) it would make my job a whole lot easier – I wouldn’t have to spend quite so long debating with clients over whether they’ve wasted their money or not. And I would probably be a multi, multi millionaire (which I’m not!)

    Thanks for listening :-)

    October 9th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
  4. Nathan says:

    I never noticed adds on this site before. It took me a good 30 secs to find them just now.

    October 9th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
  5. jody says:

    am being really dim, can’t find the ads, where are they? where are they?….. oh! there they are, they are sooooo small, do not worry about them – except in the instance that this blogpost leads to a reordering of ads and then they become HUGE, that would be bad.

    this also got me onto thinking about what is a greater evil or lesser evil – in the vein of ‘joggling the seat in front’ – the other day I was in a ‘coffee house’ type place, it was full of lounge type chairs and sofas. I ‘lounged’ and I put my feet up on the low coffee table, wooden, in front of me. After I had finished my coffee and was reading the magazine I had brought in, the serving lady asked me to put my feet down, as ‘a customer had complained’. I briefly wondered what would happen if I said ‘I am a customer also, and I will complain if I cannot put my feet in a loungy position on the low down coffee table that is simply asking for feet.’ – then I remembered I was a Christian and politely removed my feet.

    What did slightly disturb me was that she said it was fine if I wanted to put my feet up on the sofa. Something which I thought a slightly bizarre thing.

    sorry for the ramble – I don’t ramble that much so I’m taking the opportunity now.

    October 9th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
  6. Simon Boswell says:

    I agree with Jon H – advertising is not inherently bad, and the vast majority of us are able to filter out any message that we are not pre-disposed to hear.

    However, a valuation of $10bn on Facebook does tell us a lot about how some people value the potential of advertising. Ironically they are more suckered by advertising than the customers themselves!

    October 9th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
  7. Anne says:

    I don’t mind ads as long as they sit there on the screen in a quiet, civilized fashion and don’t wiggle, jiggle, bounce–or worst of all, make noise. I don’t want to go for my daily news and be subjected to a bunch of people shaking what their mamas gave ‘em in time to a blast of 80’s disco. That happened to me enough on CNN that I finally blocked all ads from them. Lord knows what people do who work in business offices with other people. That’s why I have (and use) Firefox’s Adblock utility. I let ads through on sites where they’re tolerable. (To the everlasting credit of BBC News International, they don’t do any advertising. I visit them often.)

    Anne

    October 9th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
  8. Lynda says:

    I’d never noticed the Adsense before either! Several sites I visit use it, at the top of the page, and it is distracting, esp as the word sensitive ads are occasionally rather bizarre …

    I’m trying to teach my kids that ads can be fun and clever, even entertaining, but that they are not a reliable source of info and that we need to keep a sense of proportion – I figure that’s the best I can do.

    October 10th, 2007 at 9:05 am
  9. Dave says:

    Thanks for the comments.

    I use adsense on individual blog post pages – two ads at the top, two at the bottom. At one point I used them on the main blog page and on the main cartoonchurch.com site, but decided to remove them for various reasons that aren’t that interesting.

    October 10th, 2007 at 9:39 am
  10. Jaded for Jesus says:

    I agree with Anne – no jiggling, dancing ads, please. Yours are subtle, Dave. Yes, advertising’s a fact of life, and isn’t all bad or necessarily dishonest.

    October 10th, 2007 at 10:21 am
  11. lanark says:

    I seem to be slightly ahead of the pack on this one with this post that I wrote a few weeks back. (Health warning: Like everything I write (including this) it shouldn’t be taken too seriously).

    October 10th, 2007 at 1:57 pm