I’m skimming through posts from a great blog called ‘skine art which is all drawings from people’s Moleskine notebooks. I’m reading it in Google Reader of course, so I’m just getting the RSS feed. ‘Skine Art has added Google AdSense to their RSS feed to deliver ads to their readers like me who don’t visit skineart.com.

ANYWAY, every single post contains an ad for Yes on Prop 8 (which if you don’t know, is the California Proposition to ban gay marriage through a Constitutional Amendment. Yes being the “yes, ban it” side of the issue.) I bring this up not to argue the political point but to point out the expense of this advertising campaign.

It’s my understanding that the way Google Ads work is this: Google allows advertisers to bid on keywords which match content on websites (or Google search pages). The better your ad content matches the content on the site or search serving those ads, the less you pay. The reason being that Google values the user experience higher than the advertiser.

In other words, if you want to advertise your anti-gay marriage stance on a blog that shows nothing but drawings of birds and landscapes and bicycles, then you are going to pay a ridiculous amount of money to do so. Because your ad is completely unrelated to the content of the site.

The only reason I am getting served those ads is because Google recognizes my IP as being in California. So the Yes on Prop 8 people are buying anything as long as the location of the user is California. That’s an enormous amount of money to spend on propaganda meant to influence voters to ban two people in love from expressing it in marriage.

ADDENDUM: Some examples of the ad in “context” of the skineart.com posts below. Incidentally, hey ‘skine art, I think you can reject these ads from being shown on your site if you’re so inclined.