Has Anyone Considered Blocking Kids ON THE NET from Seeing AdSense Ads?

[koan]

Considering kids might be click happy and aren't going to convert with adsense advertisers, has anyone considered using some web protection tool to keep them away from your web site so you don't get afflicted with the dreaded smart pricing? Do any of them work?

Is that unethical? Has adsense corrupted my brain and I lost the internet ideal? I have a site that might attract this "undesirable" demographic unintentionally... I'm wondering if I should try it out.. especially since the past few days have been horrendous with adsense with this site while my traffic was actually higher than normal.

[Visit Thailand]

discussed for kids at home here.
[webmasterworld.com...]

As for kids on the net how would you determine a viewers age?

[edited by: Visit_Thailand at 6:04 am (utc) on Feb. 15, 2007]

[koan]

Well my issue isn't with blocking kids at home with the windows host file, it's with the traffic on my site in general... adult sites use some web services like net nanny (not sure of the name) that may help.. but would that affect my ranking with Google also? that's another question. The issue is not letting under 12 years old mess up with your ads and get you smart priced.

[jetteroheller]

My doughters 6 and 8 years old have found some websites designed for children.

On some pages are on the left and on the right side a 120x600 AdSense block, but I have never seen my children clicking on the ads.

The notebooks of my children have marked user agent strings, so my sites do not show them AdSense. But they have also never visited my sites, since the SSI on my serer sends me an email about every blocked user.

[MThiessen]

Didn't we just have a post like this a day ago? Anyway the solution is still the same.

Use your HOSTS file to disable google ads on your local computer(s)

[jomaxx]

MThiessen: You shouldn't reply based on the thread title alone.

Koan: you're talking about 2 different things: not showing ads, which seems fine although unnecessary, and preventing kids from accessing your website at all, which strikes me as unreasonable and very foolish. It wouldn't be "unethical" (it's your site and you can do whatever you want with it), but it would be foolish.

First of all, there's almost never going to be an accurate way to determine the user's age. Even if they have previously registered and provided accurate information and are signed in, it could very well be a sibling or parent currently surfing your site.

Second of all, even if you may not be profiting from direct advertising revenue, this traffic can still generate buzz and inbound links. And accessibility problems may lead to people actively removing links to your website -- why would I want to link to your site if you are trying to cherry-pick who's allowed to visit it?

[martinibuster]

I fixed the title so that those who don't read the actual thread can join in, too. :)

[MThiessen]

My mistake, sorry.

It's gonna be real hard to tell who is and who isn't a kid. Most kids don't think of themselves as "kids" and say they are adults on everything they sign on to.

This would be a tough one indeed!

[koan]

Yeah it's a conundrum. Well I'll just resign myself to stop being an adsense freak and accept that with some sites, it goes with the territory. Thanks, jomaxx, you have some good points. Obviously, it would probably be a more civilized solution to just not show the ads instead of blocking kids since they, too, can provide a few good inbound links. Anyway, technically it would probably be a nightmare to implement. We still don't have any international standards for site rating, do we? I know it's been tried in the 90's.