Eye Don't Need No Stinking Relevant Ads

Last week Eye Weekly launched its newly redesigned website, a bland, nondescript piece of work with which we were, at the time, less than impressed. Aside from its use of a puny font that borders on illegible for all but the eagle-eyed, our biggest quibble with the site was its lack of a distinct visual identity to set it apart from its competitors. Days later, Eye's online team has solved that particular problem; unfortunately, eyeweekly.com's new unique identity is "the website with the annoying, irrelevant, and nonsensical hyperlink ads peppered throughout every article"—which, we assume, is not exactly what they were going for.

Granted, the in-article advertisements—provided by Chitika Linx—aren't always completely useless. The ad program knows, for example, that the phrase "hand-jobbing Rahm Emanuel" has a tenuous connection to the topic of romance, and helpfully provides a link to dating site match.com. On the other hand, what the mention of World War I in a theatre review has to do with laser eye surgery is beyond us.

In fifteen minutes spent browsing Eye's website yesterday, nearly the only contextually relevant advertising we encountered was a banner ad for hardcore porn in the adult personals section (link very, very not safe for work). For the site's own good, this inadvertent image rejig most definitely needs a rethink.