I’m a firm believer in contextual advertising — making ads have some very direct correlation to the content that brought the user to the page in the first place. Of course, Google AdSense has made this concept pretty common (see the ads around this post for example) but controversial Tour de France winner Floyd Landis” offers a great example of this strategy on his blog. Here’s his site (as of, uh, now):

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On the lower right you’ll notice an ad that says “Learn more about the hip Floyd chose”. Clicking through we learn that inside Floyd there is a Birmingham Hip I really wish that clicking through had taken me to a testimonial and more information about Landis’ hip and such. But still, not bad for a (basically) non-commercial site.

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on October 18, 2006.