MediaDailyNews has a great article that describes a situation where running Adsense didn’t work out for one blogger who wasn’t happy with the type of ads being served on his politically conservative blog.
‘Maloney pronounced Thursday on his site that Google’s contextual ad service, AdSense, was ‘not ready for primetime.’ He complained that Google routinely sent ads that weren’t meant for his conservative audience. One ad, for instance, asked readers: ‘How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?’–referring to the voters who re-elected President George W. Bush in 2004.
‘I could live with the occasional mistargeted ad, but it seemed that a vast majority of the ads were inappropriate for large segments of this site’s audience,’ Maloney wrote Thursday on his site. ‘I could even live with the many ads that highlighted positions different from mine, if some of them weren’t so downright insulting.’ Maloney cited ads that sold T-shirts labeling Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and President Bush ‘asses of evil,’ and ‘Hillary for President’ ads. Maloney since withdrew from AdSense.’
It is a good reminder that whilst Adsense can serve incredibly relevant ads at times that it is an automated service that does not have the ability to discern opinion, sarcasm, tone or the points of arguments or debate.
