All Blog Posts from Public Eye

So we’ve got ads on the top of the computer screen. We’ve got ads on the side. (Just look over --->) We’ve got ads that float around and you have to chase to close. (“Where’s that X?”) And ads that just take over the screen for a few seconds, which always seems to be a few seconds too long.

That pretty much covers online advertising, right?

Nope, as Arizona State’s Tim McGuire noted recently, now certain words are for sale in some stories in the Arizona Republic:

Ford Motor Company owns football. American Express owns Texas. Pitney-Bowes owns business. If you didn’t know that you haven’t been reading the Arizona Republic’s AZ Central.com this week.

Without fanfare AzCentral has started to put two green lines under words in stories on the Money section and the Sports section. It appears stories in news and local sections are immune, but the web site has ways around that. It also appears that the underlines can change from minute to minute.

These ads are an interesting alternative to the more intrusive ads that impede you from your destination, but I have to think that the ‘rotating’ associations for each word will end up cancelling out the ad’s power.

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