January 24, 2007

MotherJones.com Ignores Privacy Laws in a Blatant Attempt to Sell Advertising

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In an ironic and diabolic move to generate advertising revenue to support its journalistic mission, MotherJones.com recently launched a series of ads on its site to encourage users to willingly disclose personal information on consumer habits in an online user survey. Even more shocking, these ads tout that users who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing to win some really cool prizes donated by advertising sponsors Aveda and Patagonia.

When questioned about this blatant attempt to learn more about its website visitors, Associate Publisher of Sales & Marketing, Suzanne Saluti was quoted as saying, “We don’t intend to release personal, individual user information to anyone. We will merely aggregate the data and share those results with the advertising community in order to generate online ad sales to off-set the costs associated with providing in-depth investigative reporting on the site.”

You can view (and participate in, if you dare) the survey here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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