I was reading news in my newsreader today and I clicked on an advertisement in a particular feed, thinking it looked kind of interesting. (It was an ad for 'Career change tests'. I wanted to look at it purely out of interest! Honest!) This is what I got:
We Apologize!
The advertiser you clicked on has requested not to receive any visits from users outside of their market area.
Firstly, I am not sure what they mean by 'market area'. Do they mean their geographic area or their target market? I presume they mean the former and as my IP didn't fit the range of their area it was blocked. What could be so geographically sensitive about a career test? Secondly, even if they couldn't offer me any professional help, surely they could have let me into the site and included a note about their service area on the front page? What do they care if I look at their site? Because they can't make money out of me I am not allowed to even look at their site? The ad said 'Free' career test, obviously they didn't actually mean it.
I find this such a primitive attitude. I would have been quite accepting to visit their site and be notified that they couldn't actually offer me their services due to my location. To try to apply business rules like this is completely counter-productive. It's like telling people they can't link to you without your permission. This is how the web works. Websites link to other websites and people use links to get around, sometimes randomly. You can't control how people use the web, the best you can do is develop a strategy for your site that actually takes into account the behaviour of users and the nature of the web itself. To attempt to control the web is to make your site and more importantly, your organisation look foolish. Understanding the beast is the first step to conquering it.
(Just to add: stripping back the URL to the domain name only rendered only a white page. Googling 'edapebaf' didn't get me to their site either. They've done a good job!).
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