NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Censorship of Advertising on the Internet
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Censorship of Advertising on the Internet
BULMASH.COM Sales (sales_at_bulmash.com)
Mon, 5 May 1997 13:31:03 -0800
"C. Alpers" <tropitie_at_silcom.com> wrote:
> I recently submitted a banner ad for my site to a banner exchange
> organization which was rejected because they feared that other members
> and viewers might not like it. The banner consisted of a small...
I too had an innocuous ad, linking to innocuous content rejected and I
won't be bashful about who did it... Link Exchange. They have a
blanket policy that any ad containing a scantily dressed woman will be
rejected, even if neither the ad nor the content is really prurient.
According to them, they have instituted this policy after long
experience with the many webmaster members of their exchange. As much
as I disagree with it, I can understand it. Many people have no
interest in reading the whole ad or investigating the linked content.
They just see the woman and immediately pull out the step-ladder so
they can get up on that high horse. Though I think this is appalling,
put yourself in the shoes of the LE admins. Which would you rather do,
reject the ad right off or deal with the mountain of angry mail it
might generate? With thousands of members, even if 1/10 of one percent
were offended, that's conceivably more members lost by accepting it
than by rejecting it.
We've already seen the post on this list from the guy who got harrassed
by the pro-hemp people. It is very easy on the net to just fire off 1
or even 1,000 e-mails to express your displeasure. Take for example
the experience of Paul Engel as reported in the April '97 of _The Web_
(www.webmagazine.com). After a heated exchange on a discussion board,
another surfer sent him 25,000 e-mail messages, each containing the
same one-word message... "idiot." That will overload the average POP3
mailbox and could cause server problems. If you're running in Unix and
you have a decent command of shell scripting or Perl, you could write
the program to send 25,000 e-mails in 5 minutes or less.
There are a lot of reasons to tread lightly.
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