Summary. Many years ago, the New York Times made an administrative decision that wasn’t necessarily in the best interest of its readers, but did promise to produce more revenue for the corporate executives running the operation. The paper chose to begin running pop-up ads, a practice that most people find offensive, annoying, and an irresponsible waste of bandwidth. Some of the ads were misleading, others were offensive, none were content relevant. I quit visiting the New York Times website years ago back when they proved through their poor advertising practices that they place money before quality journalism and readership respect. Their new motto could have been, “All the news that’s fit to print, and some annoying pop-up ads, too!” Unfortunately, the New York Times has engaged in this practice up to the present day and there seems to be no indication they will ever stop.
New York Times Hacked. The New York Times sells their readership by the thousands, in the same way that a cattle rancher sells cattle. This past week, they unwittingly sold their readers to computer hackers. Their reaction was to tell their readers that they (their readers) need to be more careful. Today, 15 September 2009, the story is headline news in newspapers and on websites around the world — except for the New York Times where the story seems to have been censored from their main page only 24 hours after it was made public.
Better Advertising. A better approach to advertising, that serves advertisers better, and also provides a useful and desirable service to readers, is to offer content/context relevant advertising, as well as public service announcements and advertisements for non-profit organizations. This approach helps everyone, and harms nobody. Selling website visitors and readers to the highest bidder always has been a bad idea.
Take Action. Here are some steps you can take:
- My advice now, as it has been for years, boycott the New York Times until they take on a more respectful and responsible advertising policy.
- If you must compute using Windows, compute responsibly and use an anti-virus program such as AVG AntiVirus.
- If you have a choice of what computer to purchase, buy an Apple computer because they don’t have the same problems as Windows computers with adware and viruses.
Video. Below are some video commentaries by Gregory Johnson about this issue.