Blizzard’s marketing department has to be scratching their heads at this one. Penny Arcade is notoriously picky about who gets to advertise on their site, for those that didn’t know. (Link to original article at Penny Arcade for posterity.)
–Ravious
No head scratching likely.
Blizzard’s marketing has not surprisingly bought up the keywords of their competitors product names to display their ads on pages mentioning them using Google’s AdSense, which is where those ads come from.
Penny Arcade could go in and block advertisers from doing so in the AdSense controls, but why would they ever block Blizzard since they’re likely a huge AdSense advertiser.
Weird. Well still it’s a funny coincidence, IMHO.
Even better, when I pulled it up the top ad was for a free trial of WoW, but the right sidebar offered a free trial of Rift.