An Applebee's ad on this website?

The Restaurant Dieter does not choose the advertising that appears on his page. Nor, at this point, has he seen a dime of the advertising revenue.

I feel compelled to say this because in looking at the page today, I noticed that it carried an advertisement for Applebee's. Readers know that I am not a fan of its approach -- fat, salt and sugar layered on one another in enormous portions.

Here's how this works. I agree to let Google serve ads onto my pages. Using keywords, their software determines, from the content, what kind of advertising might be of interest to the blog's readers.

No human goes in to see exactly what the content is. So all the computers see is that I write about restaurants a lot. Hence, the Applebee's advertisement.

Before any money changes hands, a blog has to achieve a certain level of page view traffic. As of the beginning of 2012, no money had changed hands.