How can we be sure the ads that show are suitable for children?

Ads for family friendly sites

[gmb21]

A question for those of you that have sites used by children... What measures do you take to try to keep the ads family friendly?

As I understand it, there is no definitive way to tell exactly what ads are showing on our sites, so the competitive ad filter is not much use in this situation.

I have a lot of things blocked in the "sensitive categories" filter, but I read somewhere that those filters don't apply to other ad networks. Does anyone know if that is true? If so, does anyone know which ad networks are most likely to show clean ads?

This is very important to me. Thanks for your thoughts. :)

[HuskyPup]

Without looking isn't there an AdSense setting for child-friendly sites?

I'm sure I've seen one somewhere.

[netmeg]

I don't think so. I have some family friendly type sites that attract children, and the bottom line is - I don't run AdSense on them. Because there's no way to block for everything that might be sensitive that way.

AdSense is great for a lot of things, but situations where you need more control is not one of them. It just isn't set up to be that way. As I have said before, that's the price we pay for ease of implementation, and other perks. We don't get much control.

[farmboy]

Even if there is a setting for child-friendly sites, who decides what is child-friendly? Google? What criteria do they use in deciding? Political correctness? Community standards in Silicon Valley? The Pope?

One person may not want their children to see ads about X while someone else may welcome ads about X in front of their children.

I don't mean to discourage, but this subject has lots of tentacles.

Also, if someone visiting a site is so young that ads for certain products or services may not be appropriate, is it fair to have AdSense on that site at all and subject the advertiser to paying for "fun clicks?"

A lot to consider on this subject.



FarmBoy

[gmb21]

Farmboy, the visitors to these sites are adults and older children (10+), and properly targeted ads wouldn't appeal to most of the younger visitors, so I don't expect any "fun clicks".

I agree that different people would consider different things to be appropriate, that is why I like the category filtering system which gives us room to choose. But I am still unsure as to whether those filters apply to ads from other networks.

Netmeg, I guess you're right that the only way to be certain is not to run AdSense at all. Unfortunately, that's not really an option for me at the moment. I accept that we don't have full control, but I was just wondering what others do using the limited techniques we have available.

One of the things I'm considering is reducing the number of ad-units on a page, from two to one -- in the hopes that the resulting ads will be strongly targeted, and hence, in this niche, clean.

And, if the other networks don't use the category filtering, then I will probably have to block them.

Also, I have started to remove image ads from many of the pages, because I think they are often more likely to be offensive.

[netmeg]

But ultimately, and particularly with personalization and interest based ads, you do not know what any children will be seeing on your site. (And don't for a minute think they won't click on them. And that could possible affect your smart pricing.)

AdSense and kids are a bad match.