Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As you know, I run Under Mars, a military photo site. Anyway, I just added advertising to it, and while usually the ads are very relevant (”Impeach Bush”, “Buy Body Armor”, “Iraqi Oil”, and so on), sometimes I get weird ones. Check this screencap out:

Hmmm. Compare hotel prices on Mars? I wasn't aware that Mars even had multiple hotels to choose from. The real punchline to me is that because it's kind of weird, it's probably going to generate clicks, which the company will be charged for — and the domain name (at least as far as I can tell) doesn't even exist, meaning they're being charged by Google for advertising that is totally useless? (Assuming the domain listed is genuine; I didn't want to risk my own ad account by clicking it). Even if it sends traffic to their main page, I can't imagine it being relevant…

Either way, it illustrates the problem with some of the bulk-buying of generic (and automatically customized) advertising from Google and other vendors. Not that I'm complaining, since I'm on the other end of the equation!

Edit: According to Badur (because like I said, one of the cardinal rules of Google is “don't click on your own ads”), these ads return info on hotels in Mars, PA, the Mars Hotel in Prague, and so on. Meh. Maybe I watch too much sci-fi, getting all excited about (non-existant, at least for now) hotels on other planets.

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