CYBERSPACE — The Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) has lost two advertisers over their choice to run their company’s ads next to adult title listings.Barclaycard and The National Lottery in the U.K. pulled their ads off the site completely. Barclaycard said in a statement regarding their decision, “The Internet Movie Database seeks to list all the movies which have ever been made, including adult ones, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be described as a porn site. As company policy, we seek to advertise only on reputable websites and temporarily removed our adverts from this site while we carried out a full investigation and spoke to the website.”
The move follows recent action by advertisers on Facebook.com when mobile network operator Vodafone and several other companies pulled advertising from the site after appearing next to profiles that violated company policies.
Facebook has since created an option allowing advertisers to blacklist content types of content with which they do not wish to be next to.
Will advertisers continue to advertise on sites that contain user-generated content with little control over what their ads actually run next to? Only time will tell.
