Angry in the Great White North

I don't buy traffic.  Besides the expense, I'm not sure I can figure out how to make certain my ads would appear on the right pages, that is, that my ad would appear on a page likely to be visited by someone who would want to visit my site.

And even if I had the magic touch to pick the right keywords, how do I know that an ad placement service wasn't just dumping my ad on any old site, just to burn up my credits and force me to buy more?

With that in mind, take a look at this screenshot from The White Nationalist Front website, one of those white supremacist groups:

Along the right is an ad from IMVU, the graphical chat room service.

Is IMVU actively seeking out white supremacists to join in their chat rooms?  I find that hard to believe, given IMVU's push for more membership outside of North America. 

So why are those ads there?  Judging from the underlying code, the ads are being served up by 24/7 Real Media.  The company brags about its ability to place your ads where they will work:

Our Global Web Alliance reaches across thousands of web sites around the world. It has unrivaled targeting capabilities and offers robust rich media and cross-platform advertising allowing you to reach your target audience when and how you want. 24/7 can help you reach and engage with your customers and make the most out of your media buying dollar.

Who would you like to reach and how and when would you like to reach them?  We can get as precise as you want.  Would you like to reach single women who own cars and are sports-enthusiasts in Chicago, or maybe Japanese teens that live in the city and buy DVDs?  Whoever you want to reach, we have targeting down to a science.

Yeah.

Hey, it's not just 24/7 media.  Google does it too.  Here's the ad served up by Google on the same site:

BlackScene, the "premier ebony dating community", has its ads served up by Google on a white supremacist site.

This is why I don't buy advertising.

I do get it: I do understand how this stuff works, by the way.  If I have a page that speaks disparagingly about black people, a dumb search engine (as if there is such a thing as a smart search engine) sees references to black people, figures this is a site of interest to black people, and serves up an ad from BlackScene.  Nothing nefarious is going on, but it highlights just how far short of the marketing hype the reality of context-sensitive advertising falls.