SIVACRACY.NET

There is a fair amount of discussion in the blogosphere about ethical questions related to bloggers accepting a free trip to Holland sponsored by blog advertising interests. There are interesting posts at e.g. Pandagon, Media Girl, Rox Populi, Pen-Elayne, and Utopian Hell. [Update: see also Spot-on]. I understand the controversy. Where I'm confused is why accepting a trip from advertising interests is different from accepting money for running advertisements. I didn't much like going to feminist blogs and seeing the "Welcome to Porn Valley" ads, and the advertisement below, which appears on several blogs I frequent in slightly different form, really annoys me:

DO YOU SUCK AS WELL AS FUCK?

Ick!!! Meanwhile, substantial research demonstrates fairly convincingly that advertising invariably will affect content. One outstanding scholarly account of this phenomenon is the book "Advertising and a Democratic Process," by C. Edwin Baker, a law prof at the University of Pennsylvania. Scholarly works by Robert McChesney are also highly persuasive on this point. Or see for yourself, by going to a popular, ad-runnning blog that has been around for a while, browsing the archives, and observing how the posts changed when drawing reader traffic became more important.

I understand the temptations of advertising revenues, and I think blogs that run advertisements can still be very valuable, but thinking through the implications and consequences of various revenue generating paradigms is important. The Holland trip is simply a new manifestation of the issues that arise when people attempt to monetize the Internet, see for example this somewhat odious article from 2002.

Update: Following a link to the Blogsheroes site, which bills itself as "the feminist bloggers network," I was subjected to a "Gooooogle Ad" for Kate O'Beirne's "Women Who Make The World Worse," which is about the most anti-feminist book imaginable. This does not exactly enhance the credibility of the site.