The Tragedy Tag ⇥ parkerhiggins.net

Parker Higgins:

I was looking at the HTML source of a recent New York Times story about a tragic plane accident — 150 people feared dead — and noticed this meta tag in its head:

<meta property="ad_sensitivity" content="noads" />

There are no Google results for the tag, so it looks like it hasn’t been documented, but it seems like a pretty low-tech way to keep possibly insensitive ads off a very sensitive story—an admirable effort. It’s interesting in part because it’s almost an acknowledgement that ads are invasive and uncomfortable. They cross over into the intolerable range when we’re emotionally vulnerable from a tragic story.