Will China's Ban on Google access Affect AdSense Publishers?

[fredw]

From MSNBC:

"We have found that the English version of google.com has spread lots of #*$!ographic, lewd and vulgar content, which is in serious violation of Chinese laws and regulations," said foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang at a news briefing. He said authorities summoned Google representatives and told them to "remove the material immediately."

Chinese Internet users were unable to connect to Google's main search site or its China-based service, google.cn, beginning Wednesday evening.

Does anyone think this will affect the Adsense income of US websites? What about websites in other parts of the world?

P.S.: China is claiming they are not responsible for the outage. Yeah, right.

[edited by: fredw at 7:52 pm (utc) on June 25, 2009]

[incrediBILL]

Sure it might impact some, but I doubt it will impact many unless you directly address the Chinese market.

I know it probably won't have any effect on me as I've firewalled off China and several other Asian countries just to stop spam.

[stevegpan2]

I would think only Google will lose the most, as Google serves a lot of advertisement from Chinese manufacturers.

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:30 pm (utc) on June 25, 2009]
[edit reason] Edited for off topic comment. [/edit]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Perhaps they have got their just desserts for compromising their principles (when they previously censored their results to keep the Chinese happy in 2006).

[koan]

I have a feeling that adult material is just another convenient excuse for the autocratic chinese government to block access to the outside world. They're probably seeing what's going on in Iran and are having flashbacks of Tiananmen.

[chrisv1963]

I hope it will affect the Adsense income of all those Chinese websites that keep stealing content from my websites :-)

[incrediBILL]

websites that keep stealing content from my websites

Getting slightly off topic but that kind of activity happens from several countries, not just China, which is why I have a few of them firewalled off, besides stopping spam, it's stops them from easily copying as well.

Additionally I have my sites set to NOARCHIVE so there's no SE cache pages to copy and I'm not in Archive.org, or any other place that could be used to rip a copy of my site.

It's all about controlling information and you don't have to be as big as China to do it either.

Even a lowly webmaster you can take control of your content if you're diligent enough.

[tim222]

China's action could be financially motived. Less competition from Google means more business for Baidu and/or other Chinese search engines. China probably sees search engine traffic as a huge revenue opportunity. But they likely don't see a any revenue when a Chinese citizen clicks a Google ad. The easiest way for the government to get them to click on Baidu ads instead would be to ban Google. Or perhaps Xinhua will release their own search engine.

[koan]

that kind of activity happens from several countries, not just China

True, but China is notorious for its problems with plagiarism, even in academic circles. And dealing with chinese web hosts is very difficult.