It’s great that services like Google’s Adsense are available to to place ads on websites without owners having to expend very much effort. It drives me crazy, however, that those sites which have a wide variety of content from day to day (such as this one) tend to have adverts which are anything but appropriate to the visitors who read the material.
The service allows you to choose particular ads or to choose to exclude particular ones, but that’s about the limit of one’s control.
Today’s invention is an alternative to the rather naive, text-based algorithms which may serve appropriate ads if your website is always all about eg wiring looms or some other specialist subject.
Instead, anyone who wanted ads automatically served to their site would simply complete an online form, using tick-boxes to specify the interests of their visitors, rather than any single element of the content. The form might need to have a multilevel tree structure, but it seems perfectly do-able.
That way, IOTD visitors (with a presumed fondness for ideas, invention, creativity and design) wouldn’t be confronted by idiotic invitations to ‘meet military singles’ and opportunities to rent drinks vending machines or holiday in St Andrews.
