Friday, July 02, 2010

Blocking Google Adsense Advertisments

Recently I decided to block Google most potentially embarrassingAdsense ads on my web pages. Now I have decided to block the remaining three categories: drugs, politics and religion. At the same time I reviewed some of the other options I had for restricting ads.

Interest-based ads: I decided not to show ads based on user interest categories. That may sound odd: why not have ads which the reader is interested in? The problem is that what the reader is interetsed in may not be relivant to the content. I find it annoying when the ads seem to be targeting me personally, rather than about the topic of the page.

Third Party Ads: I decided not to allow advertisers to use their audience information to target ads. Like the interest based ads, the topics of the advertismsnts are then less likely to be relivant to the topic of the web page.

Google Affiliate Network: This service allowed me to select individual ads, but there were few my readers would be likely to be interested in (and I was comfortable with displaying) and so I have not used this recently.

Google Certified Ad Networks: I decided not to block third party companies which act as brokers placing ads via Adsense. Ads from these companies still need to compete with others for placement, so unless I knew that particular brokers specialised in embarrassing ads (or they all do), there is no reason to block them.

No comments: