Mormon ad on "catholic" site

[alexsean]

I found this quite odd. I googled something and it led me to catholicism.about.com/ . The information I found there helped and the clicking around I did led me to some interesting articles and information. The thing that I find odd is that the “advertisement” on every page is for the Mormon church. I know that about.com is not a religious site but I find it odd that the ad that is apparently linked with the catholic section is for another religion. Does the advertiser get to choose the specific pages they want to advertise on? It all seems a little strange to me.

 

[alexsean]

OK so I clicked around for a while and now the ad is for Fidelity. After so long the ads switch?

 

[JD_799]

This is definitely strange. I have never heard of anything like this before in terms of pages regarding Catholicism. I do remember the mormon church advertising on the Fox station during a time when they used to play kid shows. Like the current situation, I thought that was very strange.

 

[purplesunshine]

In the advertising world, ad space goes to whomever has money. Mormons seem to have plenty of it. Now with keywords you’ll likely see advertisements for other religions when you are looking at something about religion, rather than seeing an ad for a snowboard or a burger joint.

As far as the mormons and saturday morning cartoons…now that was an excellent ad placement. A kid could beg their parents to call for a free “Bible”…I think a good number of parents would do it just to appease their child and perhaps be intrested in morminism. I know in those ads they were REALLY careful to never say “momom” but “church of Jesus Christ of the latterday saints” Which sounds like a cross between many Christian denomonations.

Anyway…I don’t find it surprizing. I think in the end its money poorly spent. Although you can’t put a dollar value on souls…the financial cost is quite high…something the catholic church couldn’t keep up with unless it drastically took from its missions and parishes.

 

[didymus]

I found this quite odd. I googled something and it led me to catholicism.about.com/ . The information I found there helped and the clicking around I did led me to some interesting articles and information. The thing that I find odd is that the “advertisement” on every page is for the Mormon church. I know that about.com is not a religious site but I find it odd that the ad that is apparently linked with the catholic section is for another religion. Does the advertiser get to choose the specific pages they want to advertise on? It all seems a little strange to me.

about.com is not a Catholic site, it is a site about everything where you can find info about Catholicism. I’m sure they’re willing to sell adsapce to anyone wishing to reach Catholics incl. LDS.

 

[cthulhubryan]

Many “religious” sites have ads. I sometimes go to Beliefnet.com which was, at one time, a generic ‘Christian’ site but now has things for everything from Atheists to Zoroastrians.

Many of their ads are from the LDS church for was it not written that “they who spendeth the most shall see their ads become viral”?

 

[kooldood]

I saw an add of “No on 1” (No on 1 is the campaign for the legislation of same-sex marriage) on newadvent.com, the Catholic encyclopedia. It happens all the time.

 

[jonobr]

Hello

At last a topic I can get my technical teeth into!!!

There are companies who serve ads (called impressions).

When you setup your own website using (for example) yahoo, you can ad in space where your ads will be ran, these ads can be served by google or other companies filling that ad space.

If you will, its like I setup my shop and someone drops by put posters in my window.

I get paid for allowing the space to be used, the person who puts it up is getting paid by the person who wants the ad out there.
If Im selling a new gadget I could go to a company like
netshelter or cnet.com
or if I wanted to sell womens shoes, I could use

Glam | Fashion, Beauty, Wellness Advice, & Inspiration

Covering the latest beauty and fashion trends, relationship advice, wellness tips and more - all from the Glam experts since 2003.

www.glam.com

These companies have a network of affiliates with whom the server ads to.
So , I would pay the likes of cnet x dollars to put impressions on websites affiliated with their network, and I am assuming that cnet is putting this to a targetted bunch of people who may be interested.

So, in this case, about.com being a general non religious question site, will serve ads based on interest on behalf of, in this case, the Mormons.

About could be tasked with serving ads on mormonism to any computer browing anything based on religion, or it could target keywords to get specifc end users, i.e. they could be targetting anyone who is searching using the work catholic.