What's also intriguing about aw3c2's message is how his/her question clearly demonstrates how our brains have trained themselves to ignore banner ads.
I read TC every day and it took me a little bit before I realized that the huge banner ad at the top and the one on the right were a) there and b) anti-SOPA.
Cheers! I am actually a non-javascript plus adblocking person. That website is really LOUD and obnoxious with so much contrast and huge text, I have no idea what is content, what is not, what is important, what is RANDOM BIG WORDS.
Try cleaning your browser cache and Flash local storage - most likely you've been browsing a lot of anti-sopa content (not completely unrelated ;) - http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/geoip.png )
The best anti-sopa ad I've seen this morning (12h ago) when following a link to Forbes and there was an overlay ad covering the whole browser window in dark gray (marked as Advertisement in the title but no further text, only gray) - either Forbes did this themselves or somebody is spending some money to get the message around to Average Joe.
I dont see the same ads on TechCrunch in India. My guess is Google is running an Adwords campaign in US to make people sign the petition. I have seen them run campaigns for chrome, gmail etc. before.
Click on any article on TechCrunch, and you'll see that they're not showing the anti-SOPA ads against actual content pages.
I'm guessing that they're only doing this at the top level pages of these sites; possibly paying the sites for the space themselves.
Title should be changed to Adsense since it's only properties on the Google Display network.
Also, a very possible explanation could be that they're only showing those ads by targeting pages that show SOPA content. The display network is HUGE and it would be a big ticket purchase for Google to buy-out the entire network themselves (they still have to pay the sites). Are there any examples of this showing up on non-tech, non-sopa related sites? If so, please include them. If not, you're probably just seeing Google buy targeted ads around a subject (SOPA) and paying for them on their own network. Not unheard of, as they've done similar things with Chrome, etc
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 54.6 ms ] threadI read TC every day and it took me a little bit before I realized that the huge banner ad at the top and the one on the right were a) there and b) anti-SOPA.
The best anti-sopa ad I've seen this morning (12h ago) when following a link to Forbes and there was an overlay ad covering the whole browser window in dark gray (marked as Advertisement in the title but no further text, only gray) - either Forbes did this themselves or somebody is spending some money to get the message around to Average Joe.
> Average Joe
???
Edit: I do see the ads on www.Wired.com though.
Also, a very possible explanation could be that they're only showing those ads by targeting pages that show SOPA content. The display network is HUGE and it would be a big ticket purchase for Google to buy-out the entire network themselves (they still have to pay the sites). Are there any examples of this showing up on non-tech, non-sopa related sites? If so, please include them. If not, you're probably just seeing Google buy targeted ads around a subject (SOPA) and paying for them on their own network. Not unheard of, as they've done similar things with Chrome, etc