AdSense and user forums

Are user forums "News Groups", or...?

[james007]

Having success with AdSense so far on a few of my sites.

One of my sites contains a user forum, where they can ask questions and debate things. The program policies currently state...

In order to avoid associations with copyright claims, website publishers may not show AdWords ads in areas such as MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results.

By "News Groups", do they mean web pages like Google Groups which take Usenet and reformat it for the web - or do they mean site forums? It's not at all clear from the program policies.

[ewanfisher]

Agh! That's a good question. I hope we can run them on forums as I believe I would get the best click ratio on the forums I run. :-/

[europeforvisitors]

"News groups" (or newsgroups) is a term with a very specific meaning. If Google had meant "forums," it almost certainly would have said "news groups, forums, message boards, bulletin boards, blogs, and other community pages" or words to that effect.

Still, if you want to ask, why not ask Google? Just click the "Contact us" link on the AdSense site, which will lead you to an e-mail form.

[james007]

I have asked Google, but got a standard "thanks for your feedback" mail. I've repeated the question, though - and appreciate they must be very busy indeed!

[ams_david]

do they mean web pages like Google Groups which take Usenet and reformat it for the web

I have a site with archived usenet postings running AdSense, but the site is limited to a very specific topic. This seems OK with Google. No idea about more active usenet feeds. A search for "google adsense" "usenet" doesn't show much else.

/d

[eaden]

News groups!= forums.

I run the ads on a forum with no problem.

[europeforvisitors]

News groups!= forums.

Newsgroups are forums that use the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP):

[freesoft.org...]

[james007]

In which case, I'll add them to our user forums. Thanks!

[james007]

Confirmation from Google, who say that forum pages are okay.