Google in bed with Porn sites?
I was watching a TV magazine program, and one of the features was on the growing popularity of homemade pornography. I was not really interested in the segment, but I did leave it on as there was a segment coming up later that I did want to see. Usually when I am watching a program in the kitchen, as I was on this night, I will read a book during the commercial breaks, or in this case, during a segment of a program I don’t much care about.
Then I heard the reported on the program mention home video editing, and I glanced up. There was a home video editing computer, and guess what it was? If you said a G4 Macintosh, you’re right. (This was before the G5 came out.) And it struck me as off that this home porn producer was using an Apple Macintosh, and from what you could see on screen, iMovie as well.
I made a note to do some further research on this sometime in the future, thinking perhaps it would make an interesting article. I never really got around to writing it, though. So that note sat in my FileMaker database of potential story ideas for over a year.
I came across my note the other day, and decided to do some preliminary work on the article. I was curious to find out if any other site had done a like story. The only one I knew about was an old Rodney Lain article at, I think, MacObserver. Could have been AppleLinks. (I am simply too lazy right now to go check.)
So I did a search on Google for “Macintosh Porn†hoping to come up with some hits. Of course, most results were porn sites, as I expected, but those are easily avoided simply by looking at the URL and the brief description. (On a side note, I did find this article from CNN.com that I found interesting.)
Google returned 131,00 results. Way too many for me to look through. But what else I found was rather surprising.
Google makes a ton of money with their “AdWords†feature, which is the small text advertising displayed on the right hand side of the page at Google after you perform a search. These are targeted ads, based on your search criteria. They are easily ignored, which I usually do. But this is what I found after doing the above search.
Needless to say, I was quite surprised. Google takes ads from pornography web sites? Since when? Google will soon be a publicly traded company.
I am no prude. I don’t have a problem with adult entertainment websites. I don’t frequent them, but if you do, that is your business. I could care less. I also don’t want to see government regulating them. But I digress.
Here is what bothers me.
I was seriously thinking about using the Google AdSense. What this program does is display Google’s AdWords ads on your site, and you get paid when a visitor to your site clicks on of these ads. Sounded good to me, and these are targeted ads, meaning that Mac resellers or the like would have their ads displayed at MyMac.com.
So I signed up for an account, before I really decided whether or not to use the service or not. No harm in signing up, no obligations, and if I decided to do it, I would already be halfway done with any needed work.
The next day, I received this email from Google:
Hello Tim,Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense. After reviewing your application, our program specialists have found that the website currently associated with your account does not comply with our policies. Therefore, we’re unable to accept you into Google AdSense at this time.
We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below. If you are able to resolve these issues, please feel free to reply to this email for reconsideration when you have made the changes.
Issues:
– Inappropriate language
———————
Further detail:
Inappropriate language: We’ve found that your website contains content that isn’t in compliance with our program policies. We don’t allow websites with excessive profanity or potentially offensive content to participate in Google AdSense. Please review our policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) for a complete list of site content not allowed on web pages.
———————
For a complete list of AdSense criteria, please visit:
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies
https://www.google.com/adsense/terms
If you would like to submit another website for consideration, simply reply to this email and provide us with the URL. If this new website complies with our program policies, we will help you start delivering AdWords ads in minutes.
Please contact us at adsense-support@google.com if you have any questions.
Regards,
The Google Team
Needless to say, I was surprised and a little angry. So I sent off this reply:
Thank you. Can you specify which words were appropriate? There is one article with the F word used, but that was totally appropriate and in fact was recognized by an anti-suicide organization. Otherwise, we are a family oriented website.Tim
I waited only a few hours before I received this reply:Hello Tim,
Thank you for your continued interest in Google AdSense.
Our AdSense representatives review all AdSense applications according to our Terms and Conditions ( http://www.google.com/adsense/terms ) and our program policies ( http://www.google.com/adsense/policies ). I apologize if the prior disapproval of your application was made in error.
I have now reviewed and confirmed that your website , www.mymac.com , meets all of our policies. Your application has been approved. Please check for a separate application approval email for your records. The approval email also includes detailed instructions on how to access your new account and get started.
Please feel free to email us at adsense-support@google.com if you have additional questions or concerns. For technical support, please email
adsense-tech@google.com.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Well, how do you like that, I thought. They checked us out, and found we were not in violation of their policies after all.
About those policies
How is it that, on one hand, they originally state we violate some inappropriate language policy (Which they later rightly reversed) and on the other, display pornographic ads on their own site? How can these two standards exist at the same time? I clicked that ad to make sure it is what I thought it was. No confusion, let me tell you! The page that loaded was very, shall we say, graphic. Just POW! There it all is, in all its porn glory.
In fairness, Google does address this issue in their overview page for AdSense: “Across the Google network, ads do not run on publisher sites until they have been reviewed and approved by Google’s editorial team. We classify each AdWords ad as Family-Safe, Non-Family-Safe or Adult/Explicit. Of these, only Family-Safe ads are shown on publishers’ siteâ€
Sounds nice. What happens when a Webmaster forgets to renew his domain name and his site is hijacked by a porn site? Don’t think it can happen? Do a Google search for “hijacked websites†and find out for yourself.
Perhaps it is just me, and there is nothing untoward going on here. Google has a right to earn money, and there sure are a lot of Porn websites out there. So is it just me, or is there some flaw here? Use the Article Discussion below and tell me what you think.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.