Image via CrunchBase
It seems that the level of political ads showing up on Google AdSense around the time of the election has caused a minor uproar among some publishers.
In a post on the Official AdSense Blog today, Google promised today to improve ad targeting and reduce the amount of time it takes for their “Competitive Ad Filter” to take effect.
“We’ve heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we’re working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we’re working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We’ll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can “set it and forget it,” while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.
One of our goals with AdSense is to help you easily generate revenue for your site without much work, so that you have more time to focus on developing great content. Many of our best ideas, like the Ad Review Center, are inspired by your feedback and suggestions. Please keep letting us know how we can make AdSense a better product.”
Judging by some of the comments that were left on the AdSense blog in response to this post, the publishers aren’t buying it:
Foodeater said…
“So in other words, instead of admitting that you guys royally screwed up, you’re going to keep skirting around the issue and essentially lay the responsibility of this on us publishers…Instead of giving us a song and dance about how to block ads, this would be the time to make an apology and admit that you messed up instead of give us some story about placement targeting and ad control.“
Jim and Garret said…
“I’ve removed AdSense and went to LinkShare. I imagine 20 Google employees sitting around a conference table and discussing ways to skirt the issue.”
aislingeyebooks said…
“‘Foodeater’ said it better than I could. Google seriously f**ked up, and now they’re giving us a long-winded, side-stepping, ‘explanation’ that does nothing to address the problem.
Google, this is what we want and deserve: An outright apology from you to your customers for the blatant use of YES ON PROP 8 ads. Nothing less will appease us.
You should know that there is already talk of a class action lawsuit against you on this, and I for one would be eager to jump on board. How much money did you make, profiting from posting these PROP 8 ads everywhere?”
It looks to me like there is a little more damage control to be done on Google’s part. I’m not sure that a simple blog post on how to improve ad targeting is going to cut it this time.
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1 Comment Received
December 7th, 2008 @12:52 pm
THink this might be a case of a computer doing the work that a human should do, ya think?
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