More Details On PBS.org’s Online Display Ad Sales Efforts

U.S. public TV broadcaster PBS, whose plans about selling online ads were not a secret (we first wrote about text ads here), has released some more details on its online display ad efforts…it announced hiring of NPBi last week.
Ads will initially run on the section fronts of the PBS website. Those include: arts, news and views, history, science and technology, and business and finance. Ads will also appear on pbskids.org and pbskids.org/go, the two main PBS children’s sites.
A long list of the kinds of ads it won’t accept:Alcohol ads, M-rated video-game ads, fur ads, gambling ads, political and advocacy ads, and “material that advertises products to children”.
Also, this is obvious, but interesting: PBS also will ban ads from direct competitors which “may include or evolve to include TV/cable networks and other products and services that compete with PBS across disciplines and platforms,” the org said.
Some resistance is bound to come in, in response to commercializing PBS.org…Jeff Chester, exec director of watchdog group Center for Digital Democracy, is up in arms about this: PBS should not be seeking commercial opportunities in the broadband market. Instead, it should be pioneering new forms of non-commercial content readily available throughout our ubiquitous digital system…only by creating meaningful interactive non-commercial formats can PBS hope to raise money from viewers/users.”
Related:
PBS Appoints Chief Content Officer To Oversee TV and Online
PBS’ The NewsHour Online Webcast, Concurrent With TV Broadcast
PBS.org Starts Accepting Contextual Ads From Google; More Coming
PBS’ Flirtation With Digital Media; New President Against Commercialization

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