THE LONG CON.
Tonight, at the top of his usual umpteen from-my-cold-dead-hands posts, this is what I saw at The Ole Perfesser's site tonight:
It links to Bloomberg's Mayor's Against Illegal Guns and their Demand a Plan page ("Join more than 800 mayors and over a million grassroots supporters to demand that Congress step forward with a plan to end gun violence").
I thought maybe the ad was instantly-generated content, and that if I accessed the site from Shooty McRedneck's IP address I'd get something else -- Wise emergency rations, maybe. But on the right side, I saw another such ad with PJ Media co-branding:
It's even more fun viewing these ads on Instapundit's "Mayors Against Illegal Guns" search page, right above items like "Crimes of gun-grabbing mayors: Second Amendment group exposes Bloomberg’s hypocrisy. An awful lot of these mayors do turn out to be crooks, don’t they?"
I love capitalism. Seriously, get me a good enough price and I'll run those mangled-fetus pro-life ads. I know how to deal with their kind.
There's a lesson in this, but it takes a long time to read.
UPDATE. The PJ Media banner's always there, irrespective of ad content, so I guess the Bloomberg ads are contextual, possibly based on keywords. It's win-win for the Perfesser, as commenter Helmut Monotreme says, because it "just props up their hypothesis that liberals are coming to take their guns."
I still want those mangled fetus ads. Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade. C'mon, Randall Terry, your money's as good as anyone else's.
UPDATE 2. In comments Robot Slave was giving me a hard time about my lack of internet advertising awareness, so I went and looked at a paper:
In recent years, Internet advertising has become increasingly tailored to individual users. In the simplest case, contextual advertising, advertising networks choose which ads to display on a webpage based on the contents of that page. In the more complex technique of online behavioral advertising (OBA), advertising networks profile a user based on his or her online activities, such as the websites he or she visits over time. Using this profile, advertising networks show ads that are more likely to be of interest to a particular user, charging a premium price to do so.
Ah, so Instapundit's ad network sized me up and thought I'd go for some anti-gun ads, huh? You lose, Madison Avenue!