Pims

Tiny projects keep it new.

Fundamentally this is one of the tensions in centralizing all your communications into a small handful of privately held, globally scaled, profit motivated corporations, and then centralizing people into semi-archaic, geo-political niche regulated markets we like to call countries.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea

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(via ohyeahfacts)

Source: fuckyeahdementia

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Beautiful

Source: thefancy.com

Stunning

formspring.me

Ask me questions about Formspring t-shirts http://www.formspring.me/pims

Why is formspring resorting to this sort of advertising? If it continues I might as well use adblock because they are really obnoxious http://i.imgur.com/Rkmy4.jpg

tl;dr yes, this ad sucks.

I don’t know how familiar you are with online advertising, but for those who aren’t, most of the time, it works like this:

We have three parties.

1. A publisher, like Formspring for instance, has a big audience, 27M awesome users in our case.

2. An advertiser, a company which selling a product or service that could be interesting to the audience on the publisher’s site.

3. An Advertising Network, which is some kind of matchmaker and provides the technology for seamlessly integrating ads from the advertiser onto the publisher’s site.

Because it is extremely time-consuming and difficult for a publisher to “chase” advertisers, and for advertisers to find a good publisher, ad networks play an important role: they provide the inventory to both publishers and advertisers. What this means, is that they guarantee that the publishers will “always” find advertisers to be able to monetize their audience, and that the advertisers will have an audience to talk to, through their ads.

This means, that publishers and advertisers (almost) never talk.

Publishers trust the ad network for displaying relevant ads, and advertisers trust the ad network for showing their ads to the relevant audience. Even though both parties can help the ad network guess which ads are relevant or not, the choice of the ad that is displayed is NOT CONTROLLED BY THE PUBLISHER.

So what does exactly mean for Formspring? Well, Formspring, doesn’t exactly know which ads are shown on the site. This is why, this dubious ad made it on our site.

We hope that the ads that are being displayed on the site are relevant to most of our users, Formspring employees included, and we’d be sad to hear that you use an AdBlocker, but, as I mentioned above, it is, for most things, outside of our control.

If you wonder which “incompetent company” is the ad network that we use,
look no further than the almighty …

…

*wait for it*

…

Google!

So, the best way to solve your issue, is to get Larry & Sergey on Formspring and ask them the question directly! Boom!