A few months ago, the web information company Alexa redesigned their website and since then I’ve been noticing these incredibly distasteful advertisements pitching weight loss products, wrinkle removers and suspicious get rich quick schemes.

The ads as posted by pulse360 onto the Online version of the Washington Post (washingtonpost.com) lead to misleading web sites that have a very similar structure and some identical features.

Recently I noticed that The Washington Post has found another clever way of increasing their revenues by offering local ads. These ads are designed to read the viewer’s IP address and determine the physical location. All this could be interpreted as a clever marketing trick, but my admiration for the Washington Post’s new ways to create Online revenues faded quickly as soon as I found out that the location information was not used to provide real local ads, but to modify the ad’s message in a very misleading way.