Bravo to EcoGeek for blocking "clean" coal ads

This business of online publishing that we and many others are involved in is fueled by advertising dollars. It's what pays the bills for bandwidth and servers and trips to cover events. Here at all the sites that are part of Weblogs Inc. the advertising sales department is completely separate from the editorial content side of the business. Those of us who write here and at sites like Engadget have no control or influence over who the advertisers are and I personally don't even look at who is advertising on the site.

I'm not sure exactly how the advertising stuff is done over at EcoGeek, run by my friend Hank Green, but it's likely that he has a deal with an advertising provider that serves up the ads that appear on his site. Hank probably just inserts some code in the page that reads and displays the banners from a remote ad server. In this way Hank gets the same separation between the commercial and editorial sides that we have here. However, Hank runs a site with a very specific point of view, much like the one we have here at ABG. He cares about the environment. A lot. So when Hank spotted an ad on his site for Clean Coal, he did what he felt was the right thing and blocked the ad. He didn't let the ad dollars influence editorial content. But he did let his beliefs influence the ads he accepts. For that I just want to send a big thumbs up to Hank Green.

[Source: EcoGeek]