In order for independent web sites to exist, there must be mechanisms to fund the creation, hosting and maintenance of the site.

Web sites that do not have a strong stable source of funding end up dying.

The most common form of funding sites is advertisements.

Advertising is a basic relation between people who want to produce content and people who want to sell products or services.

Advertisers can be extremely annoying, manipulative and deceiving;

I can understand why people many people have developed a blanket hatred of advertising through the years.

Mankind is never served well by blanket hatred. I think that balanced skepticism is the best approach to the marketing industry.

Advertising can do good in this world by funding, but is is really easy for marketing to wrong.

People on the web refer to activity that brings good things to the internet as "white hat" and activity that manipulates and undermines people as "black hat."

Before I jump into the discussion of white hat advertising, I should mention that all web site development is, to extent, an exercise in marketing. People who are engaged in STEEM are actively engaged in trying to promote their posts.

As we engage in the platform people discover different tricks to attracting users to their blog. Some activity enhances the platform (such as good content) or detracts from the service (vote bots and spam).

We all engage in good and bad behavior. I read a post that convinced me that self-voting was good. I now see self-voting as more black-hat than white hat.

I think advertising works the same way. Advertising can be white hat (designed to enhance a users experience) or black hat (designed to manipulate people). Users can improve the web experience by recognizing and promoting white hat advertising and rejecting black hat.

The Actual Post

With that said, I can get to the subject that I wanted to address in this post. There are many ways to include advertisements on a site. For example, one can just show random ads.

Random ads rarely work.

To serve relevant ads one can take two tracks: The ad server could simply deliver ads that match the contents of the page, or the ad server could form profiles of the user and drop ads based on the user profile.

When an web find finds ads that match the content, the web site can improve the user experience.

For example when a site about hiking adds unbiased gear reviews, the site is engaged in a white hat activity.

There are thousands of online stores offering millions of products. Web sites can pretty always find a merchant carrying the product they want to review.

Matching advertisements to content is an easy way to do advertising.

Unfortunately, there is another way to deliver relevant ads. A large ad network can create profiles of internet users. The ad network then creates ads that evaluates user behavior and presents media messages to influence the user.

Google, Facebook and other large advertisers use the profile method.

The companies that use the profile approach invariably start experimenting with ways to manipulate people on a massive scale.

As big tech uses the profile approach, bit tech has fallen into the negative world of manipulative, black-hat, practices.

Instead of declaring that all ads are evil, I wish web users realized that advertising provides free web sites. If done correctly, ads can enhance a user experience.

I wish people would realize that there are white hat and black hat approaches to advertising. In general web sites that take pains to find ads to match their content are engaged in white hate activity. Ad servers that develop user profiles are trying to directly manipulate people are are engaged in black hat activity.

See the SVG file for the image credits.