Starting Jan 3, visitors to wsdot.wa.gov will be redirected to a dot-com address where the state Department of Transportation will start selling ads to patch their threadbare budget.
The DOT hopes that nobody will notice the switch:
The pages with advertising will be converted to a dot-com address instead of dot-gov because federal guidelines prohibit government agencies from selling ads in the dot-gov domain. However, visitors going to the usual dot-gov site likely will not even notice when the system transitions them seamlessly to the dot-com domain.
If nobody notices, no problem? Right? (By the way: Thanks Tim Eyman! Your years-long campaign to gut the state ferry system—among other things—has totally succeeded in sticking it to the man sticking it to the workaday citizens who use public transportation.)
The DOT press release lists other government entities that sell web ads: the Washington State Department of Commerce (“Experience WA”), the Oregon Department of Transportation (“Trip Check”), the Oregon Tourism Commission (“Travel Oregon”), the California Travel and Tourism Commission (“Visit California”), and the Cook County Assessor’s Office in Chicago, which—unlike the other examples of web ads, which have something to do with the work of the agency—sells ads for Avis rental cars.
You could look at this two ways:
One, more progress down the big slide towards Idiocracy. Remember this scene, after the energy drink Brawndo purchased the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Federal Communications Commission, and the cabinet of U.S. president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho can’t figure out why plants, “watered” with Brawndo, aren’t growing?
Two, no big deal. Advertising is what made America great! Take it away, Jimmy James.
In other news, I miss NewsRadio.
Right – it’s just an archaic tradition, like separating the Editorial and Advertising departments. What could possibly go wrong when you redirect people in search of government services to websites that are designed to monetize the traffic? I can’t wait to see how many pages I have to click through to get to a ferry schedule – ’cause every time the page loads, well son, that there’s another impression. A GoDaddy-themed world of for-profit government.
How can it possibly be legal to suborn the obvious intent regulating dot-gov websites by redirecting traffic?
That sucks, but maybe people will get redirected to the Lust Lab.
It’s sad, but we’re the ones who drove them to it, so we haven’t much standing to complain. If I see to it my neighbor starves I mustn’t act surprised to find he misbehaves a bit.
That’s not a promising start, there.
I hope Washington Ferries can afford to pay someone to proof the ads before they’re published on the Web. I understand not all entities can do that nowadays.
Can we redirect Tim Eyman to somewhere else instead?
Apropos of nothing – amen to Newsradio and isn’t Stephen Root one of the most underrated people in Hollywood?
Jimmy James – The man so nice, they named him twice!
Only idiots complain about having to endure advertising. Smart people use ad blockers, and the remote controls with mute buttons for their TVs. I see no online ads at any time ever.
I love how this article lamenting net advertising is juxtaposed with an ad for MegaMatesMen.com. Now you too can hook up fast!
@ 9. This post is not a complaint about having to look at web ads–it’s about the state having to pull a fast one to legally sell some public real estate (virtual, but still) to private interests. Maybe pulling that fast one is necessary for budget reasons, but still. It’s not the kind of behavior I want from my state DOT.