I don't want to come off sounding like a jerk, but WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?!?!?!?

TwinkieTown has offered a plethora of ad space along the top banner and in the left and right columns of the site for as long as I have viewed the site. Up until now, the center column has been free of advertising. I don't think that area is anything sacred, and I personally would have few problems with each post in the center column separated by a clearly defined ad. I regularly visit many sites with even more intrusive advertising such as MLB.com.

So I don't have a problem with you putting up an ad for Extra Innings, despite it being as useful as a rubber crutch to Twins fans in the blackout area who don't have access to FSN either because of their financial condition or their cable company is too retarded to carry FSN. No, my problem is that you put up this blatant ad in the form of a fanpost with comments closed so the ardent fans who would love to subscribe to your service but can't aren't allowed to tell you how much that sucks.

I don't begrudge SB Nation or the TwinkieTown staff for accepting this blatantly dishonest form of advertising because it helps support a service I find truly valuable.

However, it comes down to this, you can either be an advertiser or a poster. You can place an ad that is clearly different than the editorial content on the site or you can put up a post and suffer the slings and arrows of commenters who do not think highly of your service. You should not, however, be able to have it both ways by placing ads that look like fanposts but are not open to comments.

EDIT: Jesse put up a post explaining the whole advertising post thing. He couldn't have guess someone would be dumb enough to be up in the middle of the night to jump on it as soon as it appeared. As I said above, I am cool with putting ads in the center column, but I still not sure I am comfortable with them appearing as fanposts, even with the yellow background. Of course, there is a good probability that I will not even remember writing this post by the end of the season and will wonder what all the fuss was about.

EDIT 3/30/11: Putting the advertisers name at the top of the ad and the different color, IMNSHO differentiates the ad entries from regular posts enough that it won't confuse viewers with a room temperature IQ, which probably includes me. I think I am cool with the current layout.