UPDATE:
as of early this morning, 11/11/2010, Amazon has removed the book that caused the outrage from its inventory. Search Engine Watch is reporting on the situation.
Not about to say we’ve got all the answers, but…
Circa 2008, when Dave from Area 224 was running U Sphere, a college admissions portal, the company faced an imbroglio of its own.
Seems one of the things we were doing to make money was selling ad space. And one of the partners we contracted to sell that ad space also sold pornographic ads.
As happens, the two ad serving systems got mixed – so our site was supposed to show an ad for, say, Bubble Gum and instead showed an ad for…
Well, we’re not entirely sure. But it was bad. We got one email that said something like this:
We just saw an ad on your site that was some of the most disgusting pornography we have ever seen. Please remove me from your email list.
It took us, a nimble little startup, about 10 minutes to confirm this was true — we called the offending ad serving company, they told us something happened, and that was that.
So we stopped showing ads. Any ads. And we apologized – directly to those offended, and in public to everyone. And we did so quickly. And we moved on.
Did we lose business? Who knows? Who cares?
The issue for us was black-and-white. No gray area. We had high school students visiting our site – we could not afford to take chances. Students and their parents expected more.
Amazon?
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