Is postrelease.com Safe?

" I don't think the site is evil - at least, no more so than any other advertising platform," right. Take everything I do, look at, type, take my pictures, my posts, my essence. Then use it against me to sell me garbage from disreputable garbage sites making money off me. Then sell all that personally identifiable "non-identifiable" data to non 3rd party, 3rd party "affiliate" companies whose only affiliation is that they buy data from each other, and to data aggregate warehouses who further consolidate all that data making it even more personally identifiable, you can track IP address to geolocation with a click, hello home address, name, etc. Minimum 5 companies making money off me, what do they give in return? Im sorry, I have more value then the ability to post or read some idiots nonsense. How much are you worth? Advertising does NOT make the "internet free," there is nothing free about it. The internet existed before targeted advertising,. before advertising at all, and should all these companies spontaneously combust? The internet would still be here.

PostRelease is an ad generation/insertion site that is being used on some blogs, forums and comment sections. I first encountered it on money.cnn.com. From what I have read, the general idea is that PostRelease scans the contents of the blog, forum or comment section it is embedded in looking for keywords that match those of ads in its portfolio. It then injects the best matching ad into the page. The intent is that the ad - while still an ad - is at least somewhat relevant to the discussion. It's presented as content on the site itself rather than some sort of click-through ad, which makes the site's authors happier since it's not potentially siphoning readers off of the original site. It makes advertisers happy since theoretically, their ad is only being placed on sites that already contained relevant discussion to their product where the readers are presumably already interested. I saw comments from actual users of the service (i.e., bloggers) that weren't very complementary on how well it did serving ads that are relevant, but the service is fairly new, and it's hard to match an ad to the discussion if the service doesn't have a lot of ads of different types (with different keywords). In the absence of a "good" match, the site probably places a "generic, non-offensive" ad. Their goal is to generate revenue from ad placement. Bottom line is that I don't think the site is evil - at least, no more so than any other advertising platform. It's not clear that there are any controls preventing inappropriate ads being displayed to children, but if the keyword matching works, sites appropriate for children wouldn't have keywords in their blog/comment/forum areas that match such ads.