Why is NBC Running Ads on Pirate Bay?

So I was doing research on the infamous file sharing site Pirate Bay a couple of days ago. Really. Research.

On the Top 100 downloads page I noticed a banner ad. If I had been drinking, which at that time of night I usually am, I would have done a spit take. There was a banner ad saying "Watch The Office Online. See full episodes online at NBC." I have included the screen grab, which I swear is not photoshopped. This occurred December 26 at 6:45 PM EST.

Every major studio is suing the Pirate Bay, which is public enemy number one in the P2P bittorrent world. And NBC is generating ad revenue for them? Either this is Machiavellian on a level I can't comprehend, or dumb on the scale of, oh I don't know, Gigli. Jeff Zucker recently told Congress that combating online piracy should be a top legislative priority. Well, Jeff, stop funding it. Maybe there's hope for the WGA after all.

Follow Ron Galloway on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rongalloway

Comments

[Paw1]

03:45 PM on 01/01/2008

Pretty straight forward explanatio­n, Ron. NBC is an online advertiser­, like many many others. Like most of them, they use an ad serving syndicate to place a portion of their banner ad budget on as many sites as they feel they need to spread the word. And like most, they pay no attention whatsoever to which sites their banners end up on or where on those sites they appear.

There is essentiall­y zero quality control when it comes to this aspect of online advertisin­g. What is laughable is the inordinate amount of time these same advertiser­s spend making sure their televised commercial­s don't run in "inappropr­iate content" that's too "edgy" for their potential customers.

This kind of thing goes on all the time.

[crabbie]

09:25 PM on 12/30/2007

NBC probably has no idea their ad is being run on Pirate Bay since it's through ads-click.­com which is like adsense and all the other places that serve ads to websites.