AOL's Calacanis: "Pull the Ads"

Weblogs' Jason Calacanis, now part of AOL, is now calling for a removal of the Ambush Advertising on paying customers' AOL Journals.

He writes in his blog:

What happened: AOL added a big-old advertisement to the top of everyone's blog on AOL Journals--without warning them in advance. These leaderboards (an IAB standard size) are fairly large, but not uncommon on the Internets (we have them at the top of all our blogs). Some bloggers were shocked when they had these advertisement sprung on them a week ago, and a small group of folks (less than 100) defected from the service in protest.

From what I've read the service has 600,000 users so losing 100 isn't a big deal on a pure numbers basis, however it's bad from a PR standpoint and I would suspect these are some of the best users of the product.

What we did wrong: The main issues: a) the advertisements were added without user permission (just like the AIM buddies last week!) b) the adverisements were added without warning, and c) when the issue boiled up we had the PR department give the following canned statement:“

The decision to implement banner advertising on AOL Journals is consistent with our business and advertising practices.”

Now that was bad--really bad. We sound like we're freakin' robots, and bloggers do not want to talk to robots. They want to speak with a human being, preferably one who is also a blogger!

Moral of the story?

Someone at AOL gets it - and has the gonads to say so! Now we just need to see if any of AOL's decision makers have the capacity to listen to Calacanis, since they're not listening to us!