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Election 2020

About Those Political Ads On NASAWatch (Update)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 2, 2020
Filed under
About Those Political Ads On NASAWatch (Update)

Keith’s 1 July note: Ads appear on your browser based on your entire browsing history and other online habits such as Amazon, eBay, etc. Google Adsense often targets ads based on words they see on websites or websites are selected by advertisers to be deluged with advertisements. The post about Jeff DeWit and the Trump campaign caused these Trump ads to start to appear. If I type “Joe Biden” (as I now have) that will likely cause Biden ads to appear (and then we will block them). We block as many of these political ads as we can (over a hundred thus far). But the advertisers are insidious and unrelenting. You can also block these ads yourself by clicking the “Ad Choices” box on the upper right. Alas, advertising helps keep NASAWatch online. By supporting our donation effort we can delete them all together.
Notice to the Trump campaign – if you are going to use advertisements to try and annoy our readers and/or skew the appearance or direction of our coverage rest assured it will have the exact opposite effect..
Keith’s 2 July update: Well the Trump campaign just put another ad on our site. We’ll nuke it as we have all the others. Hopefully the latest block will prevent more of these from showing up again. But the Trump campaign advertises like the Borg i.e. they rotate their shield frequencies in terms of ad codes – so who knows. There is a certain desperation that goes with incessant placement of annoying and unwanted political ads on websites that simply do not want them. Maybe Trump’s son’s brother-in-law Kyle Yunaska who is now Deputy NASA Chief of Staff can pass on our request to the campaign.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

12 responses to “About Those Political Ads On NASAWatch (Update)”

  1. mfwright says:
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    Good reminder for your readers about mechanisms posting political ads that are not controlled by webmaster. Oh well I guess that’s side effect of need to get money to maintain this site. I dismiss those like other unsolicited advertisement that pop up on just about every website these days.

    I have occasionally take screenshots of things like NW postings about NASA purchasing launch services from Russia, and off to the side an advertisement, “Meet Russian Girls!” from one of those sites that can do “arrangements.”

    • kcowing says:
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      The Internet advertising jungle is insidious. That is why were are trying to get away from Google Adsense such that what ads we do run always meet our criteria. Otherwise awe are forever chasing the ads for politics and other unsavory things that show up. FWIW the bulk of what people see in ads is a result fo what they look at and purchase on the Internet.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Yes, since I teach at a university I usually see ads for online degrees. Or telescopes since I go to astronomy sites. But I haven’t seen any political ads, probably because I never hang out on political discussion websites. BTW I have never figured out the Disqus strategy as it seem to be based on an National Enquirer approach…

  2. Bob Mahoney says:
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    Data mining… It’s like a twisted, malignant variation of Big Brother’s monitoring of citizens. Where have we come? Where are we going?

    Shudder.

  3. Steve Pemberton says:
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    I like the layout here at NASA Watch compared to many other sites where ads are interspersed in between articles, and sometimes even in between comments. Here you can much more easily move through the content without being distracted by the ads.

  4. sunman42 says:
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    What are these “ads” of which you speak? If we were meant to see them, we would not have been given adblockers. (Disclaimer: I contribute to the site through Patreon to make up for ad/clickthrough revenues I’m thus denying it.)

    • kcowing says:
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      These are Trump campaign advertisements – by the Trump campaign. Not everyone uses ad blockers. BTW thanks for your support!!!

      • sunman42 says:
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        You’re very welcome, Keith. Even after all these years, this is one of the most informative and useful sites I visit.

        People should know that most ad blockers can be configured to block or whitelist individual sites, though that’s more common desktops/laptops than on handheld devices.

        And I was being snide about the ads, which of course are going to multiply exponentially over the next four months.

        • kcowing says:
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          Thanks. FWIW a lot of government and corporate readers have different constraints on what can be filtered. And advertisers are forever trying to find ways to circumvent ad blockers.

  5. DJE51 says:
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    Interesting, I learned something today about how they target those ads. I wonder if also they can determine where you are also, because I am Canadian and do not see any US political ads (I know all you Americans will be envious about that!). But then again maybe it is because i don’t really browse any political sites. I actually don’t mind being targeted with ads about things I am interested in. One thing they could definitely improve upon though is, when I shop for an item, and then buy it, I still get ads for that item for weeks. They should be able to have their intelligent bots be able to determine whether a purchase has been made already!

  6. Marc Boucher says:
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    FYI, we’re blocking all political ads.