"Ask For Young's Aerated Waters" by Flickr user ninastoessinger. CC BY-SA 2.0.

After running a (horribly unscientific) poll on my law & technology blog for several months, I discovered that less than 15% of people voting found any of the Google-served advertisements to be relevant (not unwanted… irrelevant).

This is a problem.

Google has always claimed their ads are contextual and targeted to the content of your pages. This may once have been true — and may even be true for some people’s sites — but it isn’t true for me. Ads I serve to search-engine visitors are the best targeted, while those that rely solely on page content are the worst. I suspect Google’s increased “personalization” of ads are only going to make this worse, from the perspective of relevance to my content.

I’ve experimented with other services, such as Infolinks and Kontera, but the vast majority of the double-underlines show up under single words with ads that are only marginally related to my page’s content. So, for example, “offer” and “credit” will link to credit-card offers. Even if “law” is underlined, it tends to link to sites on the law of attraction.

I don’t run ads to make a profit. I run ads to pay for hosting, and I ideally want to run ads that provide some value to my visitors. So this is particularly vexing to me, but I think it’s a problem — at the very least — for any site not primarily focused on “monetization.” I don’t want ads to dominate or distract, I want them to add value for everyone. (Crazy, I know.)

To try to address this, I focus Google ads mostly to search-engine visitors, and not others (though I’m always experimenting, of course, if only to keep up with trends). I’ve used services like Linkworth, which at least lets me approve ads manually. I could choose to sell all my own ads directly — but I’m simply too small and too uninterested in marketing — for this to be worthwhile. I’ve found AdBrite and similar services are equally irrelevant to my visitors. Pay-for-posts — even somewhat relevant posts — make no sense for a blog like mine, even if they might be fine for a commercialized blog.

Has anyone else experienced the problem of irrelevance? Any potential solutions? Or are well-targeted, contextual ads simply impossible to achieve?

The New York State Court of Appeals, in Stern v. Bluestone, 2009 NY Slip Op 04740 (2009), overturned a lower court ruling that ruled that a faxed newsletter dealing with attorney malpractice issues – the same area in which the author of the newsletter practiced. Lower courts thought this newsletter constituted advertising, and thus ran into rules about attorney advertising. The Court of Appeals disagreed.

Why is this important for law bloggers?

The primary purpose of most law blogs is the dissemination of information. Like Bluestone’s “Attorney Malpractice Report,” blogs educate the reader about a subject matter that is unrelated to the self-promotion of the blogger.

Certainly increased visibility of the blogger is a byproduct of the publication of a successful blog; and as a result of that visibility, new clients may follow.

But, that doesn’t mean that the primary purpose of the blog is the retention of clients.

In comparison, I think that most people would agree that the primary purpose of television and radio ads, billboard ads, professional Web sites and yellow page ads is the retention of clients. Blogs are different because the primary purpose of blogs – sharing information – is separate and distinct from the self-promotion that is the essential element of most advertisements.

Thankfully, the court’s decision in Stern v. Bluestone is a strong indication that the highest court in New York understands this distinction. The court understands that lawyers’ creative use of emerging Internet technologies is, in many instances, simply an extension of traditional networking activities, including speaking at a seminar, authoring an article in a legal publication, distributing a newsletter via e-mail or joining a committee at the local bar association.

It’s good to know that the highest court in New York “gets it.”

via The Court of Appeals “gets it” when it comes to technology « Practicing Law in the 21st Century-A Law & Technology Blog.

In short: the same logic could be applied to a topical law blog written by an attorney, making this ruling important outside of the realm of faxed newsltters. In addition, lthough this ruling applies only to New York State,many states have similar rules, and hopefully this ruling bodes well for potential cases in other jurisdictions.

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