[LINK] Google Ad Review Center Can Block Politics, Sex and Religion

[Tom Worthington]

One of the problems with having third party advertisements on my web 
site is the embarrassment from inappropriate content. Google has 
introduced the "Google Ad Review Center", which allows publishers to 
block classes of AdSense advertisements from their pages: 
<https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43688>.

Rather than just provide a list of categories to block, Google reports 
how many times such ads have appeared on the publisher's web site and 
the proportion of overall revenue they provide. This useful, as it is 
apparent that many ads take up space on the page, without providing much 
revenue. These classes of ads make up almost 6% of those on my web 
pages, but only provide 4.6% of the revenue:

Category 	% $ 	% Ads
Cosmetics	0.0%	0.2%
Dating		0.0%	0.3%
Drugs		2.4%	0.8%
Get Rich Quick	0.3%	1.1%
Politics	0.7%	1.5%
Sex & Sexuality	0.0%	0.3%
Religion	1.1%	0.4%
Ringtones	0.1%	0.4%
Sexual Health	0.0%	0.1%
Video Games	0.0%	0.5%
Weight Loss	0.0%	0.1%

However, this creates moral dilemma for the publisher, who has to decide 
if they can afford to give up revenue from ads they do not like. I am 
not sure what any of the referred to ads look like, as I have never seen 
any of them. In my case I decided to ban everything except, drugs, 
politics and religion. The blocked ads made up 3% of those displayed, 
but only provided 0.4% of the revenue.

Google Adsense had the advantage over other ad placement services that 
it did a reasonable job of matching the ads to the content. This 
contrasted with Amazon, for example, which tended to put ads for 
swimsuit calendars on my technical web pages, whatever settings I used 
for the service. ;-)

However, Google acquired Double Click, which tends to put on whatever ad 
the advertiser wants on a page, regardless of how relevant it is. I 
tried this when it was a separate service, but there never seemed to be 
any relevant ads for my web pages and it never earned me any revenue. 
Google do provide the option of blocking this class of ads completely 
and that may be the safer option.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au