If you’re a blogger, you’re probably aware that FeedBurner recently began migrating customers to Google’s infrastructure, and in turn rolling out AdSense for RSS to certain publishers (Allen Stern had a good summary of the changes earlier this week). While initially I was optimistic when I heard Google’s plan back in May, calling it “huge news for content publishers,” today brings an alarming sign of the current state of the contextual advertising product.
In the post we published earlier today, “18 Smaller Olympic Countries to Root For,” the ad accompanying the story in Google Reader was the following:
What we have here is another example of a contextual advertising misfire – Google sees a lot of words about sports and automatically determines that an ad about fitness might be a good fit. But rather than fire up a PG ad for GNC or Gold’s Gym, we get the very PG-13 ad for a gay fitness site that has absolutely no place in the feed of any professional news organization.
Now don’t get me wrong – I’d have the same reaction if the ad was of a scantly clad female as well. It’s simply inappropriate given the nature of our business, and while I realize we can have this ad removed from our rotation (we can use AdSense’s site filtering features), the policy of shoot first and fix later doesn’t do much for readers that have already formed a negative brand perception based on this type of advertising showing up with our feed.
To its credit, AdSense does offer a new “Ad Review Center” that can give the publisher full control over reviewing all ads before they show up – but again, the default is “Run ads immediately,” meaning unless you disable the setting right away, you’re leaving yourself open to inappropriate ads. There has to be a better in between – manual review by us of every ad is infeasible and will hurt our earnings, but at the same time, “run ads immediately” creates situations like the one above when there is no flag for this type of content.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are taking a similar approach directly with consumers in separate announcements issued this week concerning targeted advertising - you can now opt-out of it on both company’s websites, but you’re opted-in by default. This is more understandable – asking each Internet user to opt-in to advertising before showing ads is unrealistic. Similarly, when Facebook serves those obnoxious “26 and Still Single?” ads, they have every right to do so, because if I hate them that much, I can just stop using the service.