That's right – recently I saw on this very blog, under the article about Gayglers, not-entirely-safe-for-work undisclosed gay banner ad. I knew this had to be contextual, but I didn't know it was from Google... |
And that's the other issue BTW – everybody know that Google Ads are automatic and webmasters don't pick them. But when you see on someone's blog a banner, without any mention about being displayed by Google, or any ad network for that matter, with bunch of muscular shirtless men, linking to a gay site with more half naked males, you could reasonably thought that blog's author posted this banner himself (for example on my website there is a rotation of banners promoting things I support).
I still see this banner, BTW, on the bottom of this page – http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-06-18-n44.html |
Another problem is that most image ads are untargeted (and usually CPM, so you might see them in every post from a blog). |
Ludwik, do you have a screenshot of that banner? (I just changed the blog template, so I'm not sure if you can still see it though...) |
After you changed the ad format I don't see it anymore, but I saved it from my cache:
http://www.ludwik.trammer.pl/inne/ad_from_blogoscoped.gif
As you can see it's animated. It leads to the www.realjock.com site. It's not a porn site, but "gay fitness community" but the rotating photos on the homepage tend to be pretty graphic, and as I said before, it's not-entirely-safe-for-work – you wodn't like your boss to see you on this site, or even, for that matter, you probably wouldn't like your boss to notice this animated banner with half-naked males on your screen... |
And I want to be clear – I don't think Google should ban this site from adWords. I just think lack of proper label makes those issues much worse than they could be. Also – Google's algorithm apparently doesn't try to catch a difference between a gay site and an article about gay issues... |
(you may need to click on the image above and refresh it to see a frame with the photos.) |
One of the samples is from Tapuz.co.il – Israeli portal, which has a special agreement with local Google offices.
TheRaveN 2.0 |
I'm new to this entire Adsense thing, but this isn't an isolated case. I'm glad I saw this before we added advertisements to our website.
http://www.canistorpedis.net/simphoni/disclosure.jpg |
Since adsense starting hosting flash banners, many times that disclosure is left out.. i thought it was strange too, because with flash banners you also don't see the preview-URL in your browser that you are going to: so you have ads that people can't check if they leave your site (from a adsense flashbanner). |
Oh I see grapic banner here – www.natali.ua/horoscope/ but it look like about flowers or something. |
When the disclosures were sometimes missing from Google's video ads, it turned out that it depended which version of Flash you were running. Google fixed that bug, but maybe it's something similar this time. |