I have had my share of blogs over the past couple of years and have also created several content and resource sites. In that time I have experiemented with literally dozens of advertising techniques but found that nearly all (unless I manually set up the ad myself) have a major flaw in their system.

This flaw is the same one that search engine’s face. Unfortunately, widely available technology has not reached the point where it can identify context. Only content. This draws some major problems in the advertising world, especially on blogs which are generally very opinionated.

In a recent post I said who I was endorsing for President in 2008. Though my article was an endorsement of Barack Obama, there were two ads that would show up prevalently in my sidebar. The first, a text ad, held the caption “The Real Barack Obama” with a link to a conservative news blog (and not even an article about Barack Obama). The second was a John McCain Campaign image ad. Obviously both of these ads were not just out of context but more over, they were contradictory to my piece.

Taking my criticism a step further, I want to point out another problem. Again this is something I see in all the major search engine’s too. I think this one speaks for itself…

Need I say more?

Until online advertising platforms learn to identify context and sentence structure above keywords, there will be publishers with less revenue, users who get sent the wrong message, and advertisers who are paying out money to advertise to the wrong demographic.

It’s something to really think about, especially you web developers. The saying goes, “Content is King” but I think whomever can extract Context will reign supreme.