Gettings ads for product I have criticised

Will visitors think I am unethical?

[mooperlee]

I have just written a pretty scathing review of a product, and now of course nice little Google ads are appearing at the end of the review, advertising that exact product.

Do you think this appears very unethical to visitors, ie I hate the product but I'm still prepared to make money out of it? On the one hand I think that the way adsense works is a good way to stay ethical, in that I can't make money out of recommending any particular product. On the other hand, it might not appear that way from the outside...

I don't really want to block the ads, partly due to lost income but also because I can't really go through all the ads and make ethical judgements about them, would take forever and who am I to know what's right anyway? I mainly like to think visitors are quite capable of deciding what advertising they want to buy from anyway, but I still don't want people paying money for something that probably isn't any good...

Any views on this?

[matt52]

If you sincerely feel strongly that the product is unethical, remove your ads from that page. If not, keep making money from that page.

You can't have it both ways... ;o)

[hunderdown]

There's a difference between the product being unethical and not liking it, and it's a crucial one. If you were a print media company, with separate advertising and editorial departments, you wouldn't have to deal with this. You'd have guidelines for advertisers, and so long as an advertiser met them, you'd let them advertise. What the editorial department was saying about them wouldn't matter--unless, of course, your editorial department did an expose that revealed that a particular advertiser was a crook!

I encountered a similar problem. I made fairly negative comments about a few sleazy literary agencies. And I got ads from them. My feeling was that if they were going to be stupid enough to advertise on a site that was ripping them, I'd take their money. I then blocked one of the companies after getting emails from confused visitors--this agency was targeting the particular niche of my site.

The bottom line is, your visitors are adults, and some of them may even like a product you criticize. So don't block just because you don't like. You need stronger reasons.