We are often asked if we directly control the adverts which appear on Liberal Democrat Voice.
We do have a policy on adverts as follows:
The adverts seen on Liberal Democrat Voice are just that, adverts. They are not the views of the editorial team or the Liberal Democrats.
They are not endorsements for any particular campaign, and anyone is welcome to speak to our ad partners to purchase their own.
Each year LibDemVoice spend over £2000 on hosting and running events at Conference, and whilst we do receive some donations (and you are welcome to donate) the majority is covered by the adverts run on the site.
None of the team take a wage and volunteer their time to the site.
If you would like to advertise on Liberal Democrat Voice you will need to speak to our ad partners MessageSpace.
We, at LDV Towers, do not directly control or chose which adverts appear on your screen. MessageSpace beam the adverts to your screen without our involvement.
One thing that does influence what adverts appear on your screen is your browsing history, if it is retained on your device and accessible. You should not assume that if you are seeing a particular advert then other people are necessarily seeing that advert too.
We once had a reader enquiring as to why adverts against plain packaging for cigarettes were covering his screen. I looked at the site and could not see such adverts. It then emerged that the reader in question had recently been researching plain packaging for cigarettes on Google. That was why the advertising programme was targeting him for such advertising.
Only in extreme circumstances would we veto any individual adverts if we feel they are very offensive to our readers. I think we have only exercised one such veto over several years.
So adverts may appear which are of a persuasion which is unlikely to be favoured by our readers. We take the attitude that if advertisers are willing to spend money on adverts which are likely to fall on deaf ears, then that is up to them.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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14 Comments
Fine with me. Keep up the good work.
Adverts appear when a reader switches threads. They usually contain graphics. The effect is to delay loading.
If you do make a donation to LibDemVoice you then get the option of turning off adverts.
My lawnmower was made in USA. Unlike cars, the spare parts do not come through @Just In Time’. The grass is growing, so i consider getting another lawnmower and lots of adverts for lawnmowers appear.
Advertising agencies usually say that half their advertising is wasted, but they do not know which half. An up-to-date figure is unlikely to be precisely 50%.
That reminds me, i must chase up my nearest lawnmower dealer again today. He does also sell lawnmowers, but i want to complete the repair of my lawnmower, soon, ASAP, or sooner.
i could also blog about burglaries of lawnmowers from garages and police responses, but should i?
Kevin Maher
“LDV premium” or is that premier/Gold
When I looked at this story and another one earlier an advert for student flats in Bournemouth appeared. Perhaps party people have a preoccupation with Bournemouth accommodation or is it because I live here? Are people outside Bournemouth getting such adverts?
I’m forever getting adverts trying to sell me another train ticket to the place I’ve just come back from!
A guest speaker at an event referred to seeing an advert at a railway station offering a cheap day return to Hampton Court for Henry 8. Underneath was a graffito “and a single for the wife”.
I have an adblocker on, so I get the guilt trip notification. I do make a donation every so often, but it’d be useful if the guilttrip notification only popped up if I forgot to donate.
So yeah, another vote for LDV premium here. I’d pay to make the ads (and the guilttripper) go away.
I remember last year, after following a lot of stuff to do with the US midterm elections, I got a series of inflammatory pro-life banner adverts from a hard-right Republican in Texas…
@Jennie – For the systems and user accounts you use most, you should be able to set the adblocker to allow ad’s on specific websites.
Fortunately, currently LDV doesn’t seem to attract many Flash video ad’s and also seems to typically only have three smallish ad’s per article so there isn’t much of an additional overhead. It also allows you to see just how much some parties, such as those with a stake in expansion of Heathrow and Gatwick, are prepared to spend to put their message in front of people.
About the only niggle I’ve had with LDV has been with some auto-play video content with sound that is continuously repeated (see for example “Layla Moran introduces Nick Clegg” in the article https://www.libdemvoice.org/the-first-photos-of-the-campaign-bus-45226.html) which wasn’t caught by my content filters and so loaded everytime I visited a page with it on (namely, LDV homepage whilst it was a current topic and the article itself). But then this niggle isn’t unique to LDV.
The adverts are related to where you are, rather than being rigidly connected to the web site.
I spent the last 4 weeks on a course in the Czech Republic, and Lib Dem Voice came complete with adverts in Czech. Apart from the fact that few of LDV readers can read Czech, the services advertised would have been of little use to UK readers.
And what about the people who complain to LDV that we carry porn ads?
I use Safari on a Mac and use AdBlocker and have never seen an advert on here.
I didn’t even know the site had any.