Today I spent some time listening to William Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection. He talked about the beginning and journey of his blog. The topic of this post will be to discuss how he deals with advertising, and his attitudes about it.
He generates a couple thousand dollars every month from his website. Most of this revenue comes from advertisements of various kinds. Except for a few deliberate promotions of Amazon, virtually none of the advertisements on this website are under his control. They are chosen for him by algorithms with one ethic:profit. They are specifically designed in various ways to select and show the ads that will pay the most at any given moment.
For me this raised ethical issues, but Jacobson is content with this modus operandi. I didn't get a chance to ask him if there were any corporations that he didn't support. Perhaps he had issues about McDonalds' suggestion to its starving employees to "break food up into little pieces" to feel more full. Or perhaps he took issue, like I did, with Walmart's notoriously poor working conditions overseas.
The algorithms which select which companies to advertise for, and therefore support, don't take these moral issues into account. I wonder if Jacobson does.
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