The Ethics of Banner Ads

Since you’re reading this web log, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’ve spent enough time online to have noticed the banner ads that appear on most free-content sites. This morning, for example, the weather site I’ve been watching has banner ads for Maytag appliances and some company selling radio-controlled helicopters over the Internet. I’m not sure either of these companies have anything to do with the question of whether there will be weather later today, but I can’t say I care about these ads being there one way or another. I believe in the First Amendment as applied to advertising, and I don’t see anything wrong with free content providers attempting to make a little money on the side. What interests me is whether any of you do…

Some time ago, the nice people who provide me with this blog space added a tab called “monetize” to the dashboard I see when I log in. This turns out to be less hype than it is a scheme by which I allow them to put up banner ads in the sidebar (and probably top and bottom, too) of the page this blog appears on; if enough of you visit the blog and click on those banners, I get a very small amount of money; if you don’t, then it’s just another collection of annoying banner ads clogging up the Internet. Which leads me to the above-referenced ethics question: If you are already providing free content to your readers, do you also have an obligation to keep your web page free of advertising? Or is the trivial inconvenience of having to see ads for washing machines and radio-controlled helicopters too much to inflict on people (even assuming that they don’t just ignore the ads the way I do)?

Before you answer that, consider the other half of the relationship. The folks at Blogspot are providing this space to me, free of charge, and while it could be argued that this does not actually cost them anything, they do at least have to expend a certain amount of bandwidth and storage space to keep this blog operating. In return, however, I have been giving them absolutely nothing for the past two years. Do I have any ethical responsibility to allow them to make their cut on the display ads that would appear on my blog, if I were to monetize things? I should note here in passing that they haven’t made any effort whatsoever to suggest that I do so; they didn’t even email me when they put the “monetize” tab onto the dashboard…

Of course, one could argue that since Blogspot is a service of Google, it’s therefore not exactly a financial burden on anyone. In fact, it’s probably true that Google benefits just from having the largest possible community of bloggers writing on the site they provide, which helps to explain why there is no charge for having a web log here and no pressure to put advertising on your blog page. Still, I have to wonder if any of that matters from a truly ethical sense. Put simply, do I have an obligation to my readers (to keep this blog page ad-free) or to my host company (to allow them to make money in exchange for hosting my blog for free)? Since the odds of getting enough traffic through this page for me to make anything are effectively nil, serving my own interests is not really an issue; the question is, whose interests should come first?

It’s worth thinking about…