So we started throwing AdSense up on USSM, and it’s been totally bizarre. For contextual advertisements, they’re remarkably bad, which is weird because Google Mail is remarkably good at that. USSM ads tend to be for:
– the Mercury Mariner
– 1st Mariner Arena tickets (in Balitomore)
– Navy or nautical supplies
– Mariners or general sports
Needless to say, those ads don’t do a lot for us, since they’re pretty much useless to our readers as a group. So we’re not making any significant amount of money.
Stranger still, I discovered something today:
Google will take ads for wine, but not beer or whiskey.
Pipes, but not tobacco, or cigarettes.
No guns, but generic ads on some gun brand names (Glock, no, SIG-Sauer yes)
Marijuana, but only some ads, which leads to hilarity like this:
Actually… I bet they don’t.
And of course, alllll kinds of porn-related keywords.
Why wine but not vodka? Why is “home brewing” cool (and includes an ad for homebrewing Absinthe) but not beer normally? Why are some legal, controlled substances okay but not others?
I think this goes toward the bigger issue of corporate censorship. Yahoo Answers is getting a lot of flack because on a discussion about the children-based “Dick and Jane” books, “Dick” is filtered into ****.
When we start censoring the titles of children’s books, somethings amiss.