As y’all have no doubt noticed, aside from the local ads I have in the rail at right — and as you see, I’ve recently added several from candidates running in next week’s election — Google inserts ads here and there on the blog, based on what it has gleaned about the individual reader’s interests.
Some of items Adsense offers can be a bit startling, and the juxtapositions with content odd.
Burl Burlingame sent me this screenshot via text this week:
There are just… so many levels on which to perceive that, most of them quite low. Looks to me like they’ve just noticed something is missing.
I asked Burl what kind of searches he had been doing lately. He insisted:
Not steroids! Or bellies!
Anyway, I always appreciate y’all sharing these occasionally odd apparitions…
Meanwhile, Adsense thinks I’m a rock star, and gives me cool ads such as this one:
I mean, you have to be a rock star to want multiple capos in every color, right?
It’s like having a room full of guitars you seldom play.
“Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!”
These go to 11…
No Hillary Clinton banner?
Nope. Or Trump either. At least, I haven’t seen either of them lately.
Probably because I don’t search for them much. I’m inundated with information about them without doing that, since I read three or four newspapers each morning, peruse 6 top news sites each afternoon (looking for material for VFPs and Open Threads), and follow just under 600 Twitter feeds…
You do that, and you’ll see more than you want to of both candidates…
Also…
I do most of that reading on an iPad, so Google doesn’t see it on my laptop…
Now Burl’s getting this, right in the middle of this very post:
He adds that he does not recall searching for “pleasant Latin women.”
Maybe he searched for Alicia Machado. Or simply thought about her. Google is very sensitive…
Is there such a thing as an unpleasant Latin girl? I don’t think so.
This is changing on the, ahem, better quality sites:
https://consumerist.com/2016/10/31/some-online-publishers-backing-away-from-those-fake-around-the-web-ads/
Hey, I don’t do THOSE things — those clickbait things with such come-ons as “You won’t BELIEVE these epic wardrobe fails!”
The worst thing about them (aside from, of course, the tackiness of most of them) is that they’re all tease, Occasionally, there will be one that is tempting — a photograph of something interesting is shown (and I’m drawing a total blank on what that might be, since it’s been awhile since I’ve fallen for this), and you click on it, and you’re in a listicle. So you think, “I’ll just click through until I get to the thing that looked interesting.”
Good luck with that. You are likely NEVER to see the thing that made you click, even if you’re VERY patient.
Anyway, I don’t have any adverts like those. Or at least, I never see them.
I wonder — can you make real money with ads like that? I ask because the income trickle from Google is pretty pathetic. Like $100 every four or five months.
Of course, that’s $100 every four or five months I wouldn’t have it I got rid of it…
The nice thing is, the payments are so far between that you forget about it, and when you get one of those payments it’s like an unexpected tiny windfall…
““You won’t BELIEVE these epic wardrobe fails!”
I might if given the opportunity.
OK, since you expressed an interest, and since this is almost exactly what we were talking about, and since this one sort of cracked me up when I ran across it this morning…
And with apologies ahead of time to ladies or anyone else offended — I promise, this is not turning into that kind of blog…
I was reminded of our discussion when I saw “30 Epic Brides You Can’t Miss.”
I just… don’t even want to know the story behind this picture… whether this is an actual bride, whether she gave anyone permission to use the photo, how the clickbait artists came into possession of the image…
Let’s just move on. But she does look very happy, doesn’t she?
I started to look at the listicle, but after a couple, I switched to the “A Few Good Men” quiz…
I also get emails trying to sell me “the same medication that made Donald Trump a genius!”
Yikes.