Internet bias and censorship
Posted by: Fats in: Fats, Vitamins & Minerals > Wika at Hirap > Media WatchSome time ago, I thought I’d write an article about why I don’t put advertising on my website. In the course of writing that article, I thought I’d search the web for other people who also didn’t like advertising on their own websites. So I went to Google, and entered the following keywords (in quotes below) and got the following results.
“no advertising on our website”
- Homes For Sale By Owner at BuyOwner.com, Sell Real Estate, MLS …
- Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
- Advertise On Our Website - The PCman Website Advertising
- Sell TimeShare: No Closing Cost, No Commissions, Buy & Sell TimeShares
- SalesTrax.com: Advertising on Our Website“wrong with internet advertising”
- Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
- The Daily Pennsylvanian
- Doctor File Finder’s overview of services at www.drff.com: web …
- Let us put our resources to work for you. Additionally we don’t use e-mail addresses that are tied to our domain names. …. Together among other endeavors and sites they run Community Advertising …“wrong with google ads”
- MYBLOG by Ouriel: There is something seriously wrong with Google …
- MYBLOG by Ouriel: So, finally Google admits there was something …
- Is There Something Wrong With Google Adsense Right Now? // General …
- I’m not seeing my adsense vertical banners on the 2 sides of my blog. - Joannes Vermorel’s blog » Blog Archive » What’s wrong with Google …
- Beyond The Invisible: Google Gone Wrong - Funny Goolge Ads
-INTERACTIVE MARKETING BLOG: Where “Google Adsense” goes wrong…
You went completely wrong with this post, buddy. Adsense actully does work.
“why we don’t put ads on our website”
- Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. … We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search …
- CityNews :: How to write an ad that sells
- Lead Discovery - Don’t roll the dice. We are changing the debt …
- Does my web site suck checklist Part One Web Pages That Suck learn …
- Teacher Website. Can we put links on our district web pages to the TeacherWebsite? …. At this stage we don’t, but work is under way to have a full affiliate program setup …
The amazing thing is, I couldn’t find any relevant information through Google (as obvious with the above search results). I tried other search engines and got largely the same results. All the results were pro-advertising on the Internet, and all the results that discussed a problem with advertising were not in principle against Internet advertising but were simply having problems with how to make the advertising work better on their websites.
However, on the Dogpile.com search engine, I was able to get a few relevant links, notably:
- Where P. Lutus answers a question from a student asking: “should we allow advertisers into college texts in order to subsidize the cost of these books for students?”
While the above link is not directly related to the topic I was looking for (advertising on the Internet), I was able to find another article in the same website which provided “an analysis of online advertising, including a true, first-person account by a victim of online fraud.” The article was called “Networks Of Sleaze”
What I thought rather surprising was that I never would’ve found that article through Google or most popular search engines.
Doesn’t that indicate some sort of bias?
At least the Wikipedia admits of its own bias and tries to do something about it:
Of course I wasn’t willing to believe that there’s nothing wrong about Google ads in particular or internet advertising in general just because I couldn’t find any information about it on the web through search engines.
However, because finding the information I specifically need is difficult when it runs counter the profit interests of a highly commercialized Internet, then the viability of most search engines as useful tools for searching is questionable.
OK, so I thought that maybe if I went to some of the progressive websites then I would get some information through their no-ads policy. By “progressive”, I thought of folks who thought differently from the mainsteam and had some kind of social and moral responsibility about the content they were putting online, and so probably had some principle against promoting a consumer-orientation to their site visitors.
You’d be surprised how hard it is to find such information.
Everyone was full of Google Ads.
Even the PCIJ hasn’t caught on what TV journalist Linda Ellerbee tried to tell everyone 20 years ago in her book “‘And So It Goes’ Adventures in Television”:
“Please remember that in television the product is not the program; the product is the audience and the consumer of that product is the advertiser. The advertiser does not “buy” a news program. He buys and audience. The manufacturer (network) that gets the highest price for its product is the one that produces the most product (audience). It might be said that the value of any news program is measured by the whether it increases productivity; the best news program, therefore, is the one watched by the greatest number of people. Argue the point if you like, and when you get tired, argue with the weather. Altruists do not own television stations or networks, nor do they run them. Businessmen own and run them. Journalists work for businessmen. Journalists get fired and canceled by businessmen. That is how it is.”
She also said, no television newscast made money before John Kennedy was shot, but the first time one did, everything changed.
Since then, we can expect Inquirer and GMA news networks to become tools for manufacturing the product (the news audience), but PCIJ? Much worse, are we succumbing the Internet to TV idiot box?
OK, so the reality is, one has to pay the bills.
Consider the approach by ZNet , the people who publish Z Magazine.
The ZNet blogs are already a tremendous amount of freely accessible information, and there are additional content available to those who can pledge a very flexible donation: “$10 a month to ZNet/ZMag (or $5 if you are low income and can’t afford more–or anything between $5 and $10, as you choose) or $3 if $5 is too much.”
Furthermore, the principle is, ZNet would rather pay the bills by selling content rather than selling their readers to the advertisers:
“Z knows that relying on advertising, which is really selling users to advertisers, makes content secondary to commercialism and thereby corrupts it. Thus, Z has to attract support via donations and/or the sale of content, not be advertising.”
I used to subscribe to feeds on PCIJ, but have removed them, apart from the fact that I have a very hard time accessing their website because of the advertising, the things mentioned above apply to why I’m not “buying” and refuse to be “sold.” This is also why I don’t have ads on my website. There’s a fashionable term for web advertising now too: “monetize your website.”
I truly hope that intelligent people re-think what that really means.
Also, the search engines are not as innocent as you think - they’re biased. And your free Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL email account? You think censorship happens only in “China, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Erithrea” and other such “oppressive countries”? Think again: AOL/Microsoft, Hotmail preventing Delivery of Turthout Communications .
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
There are alternative search engines, although most out there seem to still use the mainstream engines and thus serve basically as meta-search engines (as Dogpile.com). One of the useful ones I’ve seen is the Russian Quintura search engine that has a pretty good and simple visual map (they implement Yahoo XML). And then there’s the much fancier KartOO which needs the Flash plugin. I like WikiSeek too, which is for searching Wikipedia. More on alternative search engines through ReadWriteWeb.