Monday, April 6, 2009

Google Ads with sound ! Offensive and inappropriate but difficult to disable

Google should be ashamed of creeping in Flash Video ads with sound on its Adsense Network.

I was alerted to by members of my thriving online community that everytime they visited my site, a loud spinning wheel sound would start. It was driving users away in their dozens. Noone could work out why my site became offensive all of a sudden.

The culprit - a Google image ad in the footer of my website was displaying online gambling content. Appalled, I went into my Adsense settings to disable the audio, but couldn't find a setting for it and in any case, I would have to recreate the Adsense code, reupload and change the page code on my site.

I searched the Internet to find out what I could do about it, but came up with nothing.

However I decided to contact Google directly to report the offensive ad, after searching extensively I found this link for "Feedback on a Google ad in the content network":
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=adfeedback

I am yet to receive any response from Google over this.

Apparently offensive ads sometimes slip through the cracks. But when it does, as a publisher, it can do some really bad damage to your sites reputation. To date I was impressed with the performance and relevance of image ads. However as a result of this experience, if Google don't change their policy on Flash ads, I'm considering moving back to text ads or moving away from Adsense altogether to a more discrete context advertising providers (as there are now plenty of Adsense alternatives out there).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why not use Adblock Plus 1.0.2

Have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNvb2SjVjjI

Works a treat for my forum users who are using Firefox.