Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've run into a problem with adsense & adult content. As in, they complained about a thread on my forum.
Since I quite like being able to allow people to discuss mature matters on my forum, I am wondering if anyone knows whether it would be okay to create a subforum for adult topics and keep the ads off this forum, or whether the whole website has to be free of adult content?
I have tried to get a sensible response out of Google, but so far I am just getting the standard response about reading the policy, which doesn't really make that distinction.
I am also really uncertain about what they class as adult content. Pornography is obvious, but on a discussion forum, you can get people talking about all sorts of things that I personally don't see as adult-only. Its not made easier by the fact that I imagine Google follows American standards for such things, and they're rather tighter than what I am used to.
what I had in mind was asking G to look at a particular page and indicate whether or not is would be acceptable to put Adsence on it.
That's not unreasonable and I know a webmaster who has successfully done that to have his site approved for AS.
I'm a lifelong SF fan, in the con-going sense. Pretty knowledgeable about fan culture here.
One thing to remember is that the fan definition of "mildly adult but not offensive" is different than the general public's. Discussions can go "off color" in a big hurry.
This is not shocking to any fan who's been around fandom for very long. It probably doesn't even register ... fans, as a rule, tend to not shock easily and the discussions are expected.
Now -- take a discussion about, say, someone's favorite slash relationship or whatever the heck else they've come up with to snicker over that day ... and run it through the filter of a non-fan who may not entirely approve of fantasy to start with. The rep reviewing your site could, say, be a fundy who thinks fantasy's evil to start with and *gasp* they're talking about WHAT?! With WHO?!
Get the picture? *grin*
This is why my site (which brings in moderate amounts of money) is very firmly PG rated and the adult forums are password protected, not obvious, and shortly moving to a seperate domain entirely.
Something to keep in mind when setting site policies.
(And if this is a site about a certain young wizard ... double the warning.)
G will undoubtedly wish to display Adsense ads on video pages and since Adwords advertisers are already creating raunchy ads, those ads will now have a great place to be seen.
One thing to remember is that the fan definition of "mildly adult but not offensive" is different than the general public's. Discussions can go "off color" in a big hurry.
I don't know if I quite buy that. I'd be more inclined to putting it down to our board have quite a mix of nationalities. Including a lot of Europeans, who don't subscribe to American standards. :)
Now -- take a discussion about, say, someone's favorite slash relationship or whatever the heck else they've come up with to snicker over that day ... and run it through the filter of a non-fan who may not entirely approve of fantasy to start with. The rep reviewing your site could, say, be a fundy who thinks fantasy's evil to start with and *gasp* they're talking about WHAT?! With WHO?!
Well, I sincerely hope Google has no people employed who would let their personal opinions of such matters colour how they review things. But in any case, the thread that was pointed out as being a problem was in the general chat section, which is off-topic. There have been threads in the on-topic forums that discuss non-PG elements of the books, and those apparently have not drawn any attention. We don't allow any fanfiction though, slash or otherwise.
This is why my site (which brings in moderate amounts of money) is very firmly PG rated and the adult forums are password protected, not obvious, and shortly moving to a seperate domain entirely.Something to keep in mind when setting site policies.
I think the idea of having PG forums for a series of books that are R-rated themselves and read by mostly adults would be very curious, so we try to allow people to discuss more or less anything. Most of the members would likely go elsewhere otherwise, so keeping them happy is the first priority. However, I am hoping I can continue to combine that with Adsense by having, if necessary, an adult forum for logged-in members only without ads. :)
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:55 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. [/edit]
Folks can choose their level of filtering at Google's site, but they can't at individual publishers' sites and many are liable to go navigating through many pages of a site and come across content that they would have filtered out at the engine's own site.
I have a friend whose entire affiliate mall site seemed to be banned by Google. I checked it out and informed him that it was only excluded when the "show it all" filter wasn't enabled - because of ONE merchant he was linking to, with the merchant-provided feed and product descriptions.
He thought it very unfair, that only the particular page should be filtered and not the rest of the site. So I had to explain to him at length why it was 100% wise, fair and appropriate to filter the whole thing out of Google altogether.
Webmasters of regular sites would be horrified to find sex ads running on their pages, and regular advertisers would almost invariably not want to see sex sites in their referrer logs.
Folks can choose their level of filtering at Google's site, but they can't at individual publishers' sites and many are liable to go navigating through many pages of a site and come across content that they would have filtered out at the engine's own site.
Shouldn't their algorithms be able to compare an ad with the site it is being run on? (Obviously not, judging by some of the way unrelated AdSense ads that frequently pop up on my sites, but that's a different discussion...)
At the very least, they should be able to recognize "adult" ads and flag them. Then, allow publishers to decide whether or not adult ads will display on their sites.
And, vice versa for non-adult advertisers: Do you want your ad to run on "adult" sites?
