January 5, 2009

Google AdSense and the Yes On 8 Ad Bomb

Remember the furor over Google AdSense ads for the Yes On Proposition 8 campaign showing up on (presumably) liberal blogs, message boards, and other Web sites?

Last month, Bruce Hahne, in his must-read what-No-On-8-did-wrong postmortem, explained why Yes On 8 ads (which we’d noticed, and immediately filtered out, long before Election Day) appeared en masse across the blogosphere in the first week of November:

On Monday Nov. 3 and Tuesday Nov. 4, yes-on-8 engaged in a mass advertising bid across all “targeted verticals” available within the Google Adsense program for advertisers. This yes-on-8 advertising also presumably used Google’s geotargeting system, which allows advertisers to pay only to display their ads to viewers believed to be in a certain section of the country. Geotargeting saves vast quantities of money by allowing the advertiser to only pay to show the web ads to, say, people who are in California rather than people in Florida.

The result of the mass yes-on-8 ad buy was that for hundreds of thousands of different web sites, anybody in California who looked at one of those web pages saw one or more “yes-on-8″ ads. I’d speculate that yes-on-8 did the same thing with Yahoo ads, however I haven’t researched that. So it’s likely that for all intents and purposes, anybody in the state of California who used the internet on Monday or Tuesday Nov. 3-4 saw a yes-on-8 ad. That doesn’t mean that the user clicked on the ad and made it to the yes-on-8 web site, but certainly there would have been a lot of click-throughs.

Since the internet has just this year passed newspapers as people’s primary source of news, this yes-on-8 ad buy probably had a significant impact. …

Now, two months later, reports Network World…

Google responds to Prop 8 AdSense debacle

Site owners who sign up for Google’s AdSense program decide to trust Google and its ability to target ads contextually, based on keywords and general site content. In this way, sites devoted to analyzing the mobile phone industry, for example, don’t end up with a lot of ads for mobile homes. The idea is to match the site with the ads to generate more clicks, and revenue. Unfortunately, the day before the state of California was set to vote on Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, many sites having nothing to do with politics or gay marriage were flooded with AdSense-generated pro-Prop 8 ads, leaving many site owners far from enamored with Google.

Turns out that Prop 8 proponents simply paid Google what had to be a ton of money and flooded every conceivable market segment with the Yes-on-8 ads. Sites ranging from San Francisco’s Laughing Squid to even TechCrunch were affected.

Google finally responded to the debacle last week, although it admits that a real solution is still a “couple of weeks” away. …

…[T]he Prop 8 ads in question were probably placed via the more generic placement targeting strategy. Google then goes on to say it never editorializes its ad content, and does not favor one political party over another or for that matter “one car manufacturer’s ads over a competitor’s in our auction.” Still, Google’s AdSense policy explicitly prohibits ads that advocate “against any individual, group or organization.” …

More at the link.

I don’t fault whatever mysterious algorithm Google uses for contextual ad placement; in my mind, the root of the problem is twofold: The Yes On 8 ad bomb was essentially spamming-without-breaking-any-rules, and — far more disturbing — is that Google apparently violated its own policy of prohibiting “ads that advocate ‘against any individual, group or organization.’”

I’m very torn here — and not because we use Google AdSense (believe me, our revenue from AdSense in an entire year doesn’t pay our hosting bill for even a single month; it’s really chump change for us, and will be, until we get our traffic way, way up), but because Google is one of the precious few corporations in which I place even a modicum of trust. Oh, yes, Google has violated that trust on more than one occasion, but when you’ve spent as much time in the corporate world as I did, you recognize, and appreciate, a company that demonstrates repeated efforts to live up to Point 6 in its philosophy, “You can make money without doing evil,” as a rare thing indeed.

And, of course, Google’s exceptionally rare decision to take a public stand against Proposition 8 colors my perception, and makes me much more forgiving.

At the same time, I can’t reconcile my warm fuzzies toward Google with its own violation of its own supposedly hard-and-fast rule prohibiting “advocacy against any individual, group, or organization” and “Any other content that … infringes on the legal rights of others”.

What was Proposition 8 if not an infringement on the legal rights of others?

What to do, what to do, what to do…

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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