Daily Skiff

The Student Government Association plans on contacting the advertisers featured on CollegeACB.com in an attempt to get them to cut ties with the anonymous college gossip site, the SGA president said.

Advertisements on CollegeACB are run through AdBrite, the same advertising network that pulled its ads from JuicyCampus last year after declaring that the gossip site violated its acceptable-use policy.

Kelsie Johnson, student body president, said the SGA will send letters to the companies urging them to end relations with CollegeACB, similar to what they did last spring for the now closed JuicyCampus.com.

"We're going to monitor the site closely," Johnson said. "We will be sending out letters to the advertisers in the next two weeks."

Johnson said she believes that as the site grows in popularity it will become a bigger problem on campuses nationwide.

Peter Frank, owner of the CollegeACB and a freshman at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said he is in the process of securing more advertisers after recently cutting a two-month deal with JuicyCampus to get its former users redirected to the CollegeACB. In light of the agreement, CollegeACB's Web traffic and server costs have increased, Frank said.

"We'd like to minimize the amount of advertisements, but we eventually have to pay for our costs with advertising," Frank said.

Frank said he's not surprised to hear that SGA members are taking action but that he does not think their efforts will be effective in swaying advertisers.

Frank said he isn't worried because the CollegACB is mostly sponsored by small companies who aren't too concerned with how the public views them.

"We're not attracting top-tier advertisers anyway," Frank said. "Certainly not people who care about their image too much. So they're not going to scare away any of our sponsors."

Johnson said sites like CollegeACB are "childish and hateful" and are only good for stirring up trouble.

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