It’s hard to believe Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has much to offer online gay daters, but there was his ad on Gay.com. The New York Times reports on the trouble politicians are having buying ads on the internet. Romney’s campaign used an ad placement system that puts his ads on various sites, including Gay.com and FanFiction.net, not the conservative, religious right Romney is courting. Republican candidate John McCain found his ads on the liberal Huffington Post and Democratic candidate Barack Obama angered Jewish groups appearing next to a book the group found anti-Semitic.

These candidates are starting to discover online advertising, shockingly, isn’t the same as television and print advertising. When you let some computer pick where your ads go, as these placement systems do, you’re hoping the math always equals what you expect. As anyone who’s used any kind of search engine, the math doesn’t always equal out.

The number of gaffes makes me wonder if politicians lack of understand is coupled with laziness. They’re buying into a network of ads instead of targeting their advertising exactly where they want it. I would doubt a politician would spend the thousands of dollars on television ads, risking that their ad would appear next to a children’s cartoon show and not CNN. But web advertising is still so cheap. With some services, like Google AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. And then you’re only paying in dollars and cents for each hit. So the ceiling to advertising on the web is much lower than television. As a result, the advertising being done is being less scrutinized. But it’s a little funny for the rest of us.