Poetry takes an "ad break" on Yahoo!

In the never-ending debate about e-books, online journals, and digital poetry, perhaps the biggest question facing commercial publishers has been overlooked: Where do you put all the ads?

Alison Heller would suggest—ahem,  Yahoo!—that you don't put them right in the middle of the poem.

It’s a short poem and you think I need to be encouraged to get up and move right in the middle of it? You’re both ruining poetry and insulting my intelligence. You don’t think I can handle a poem about a foot fetish? I have a highly useful MFA in poetry, Yahoo. I understand poetry. I learned that poems have line breaks, not ad breaks.

Now seeing as how this shows up on Yahoo!'s recently acquired creepy sprawling keyword farm Associated Content, the venue itself should tell any reader of poetry that it's the ads that take priority, not the poem. Even before its acquisition, AC was generating 50,000 unique pieces of media a month, according to Mashable, for the sole purpose of sticking advertising in it. If only University of Phoenix would finally get around to offering its own online poetry MFA, that would make its ad buys alongside foot fetish poetry even more relevant.