This is a chumbox. It is a variation on the banner ad which takes the form of a grid of advertisements that sits at the bottom of a web page underneath the main content. It can be found on the sites of many leading publishers, including nymag.com, dailymail.co.uk, usatoday.com, and theawl.com (where it was “an experiment that has since ended.”)

The chumboxes were placed there by one of several chumvendors — Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, Adblade, and my favorite, Content.ad — who design them to seamlessly slip into a particular design convention established early within the publishing web, a grid of links to appealing, perhaps-related content at the bottom of the content you intentionally came to consume.

As part of a new report on digital advertising as a security threat published today by @johnnyryan and me (https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidden-security-crisis.pdf), and previously unreported:

We reveal 'Patternz', a global mass surveillance system that harvests digital advertising data on behalf of 'national security agencies'.

Patternz is operated by a company based in Israel and/or Singapore. It claims to collect data about 5 billion users from 87 ad exchanges and SSPs via 6 data centers around the world.

Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.

“They took it off because they're like, let's see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion. I know taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change. After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I'm seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”

About the Mac and PC's ads in Japan "In Japan you're considered particularly dumb and obnoxious if you're caught bragging about your strengths, and smart and nice if you play them down,"

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

"William Shatner on the telly, whoring himself for Kellogg's All-Bran."

"Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing
was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate
representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all."

"more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette"

another "blog ranker" (by analyzing Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines stats & backlinks)