When RSS ads go bad...
by Martin Belam, 9 April 2009
One of the risks of context-driven text advertising is that occasionally there will be some uncomfortable juxtapositions of editorial content and advertising. It happens on currybetdotnet from time to time. I particularly recall Google deciding that one of my lengthy pieces about working in a record shop and collecting records suited adverts saying "Do you need help with your autistic child", which I took slightly personally.
It can be even worse when the adverts are being served in an RSS feed that only shows story snippets, as the editorial and advert form a kind of unholy call and response pairing. I laughed out loud last week when this particular coupling appeared amongst my Google Reader subscriptions.
Just the post to read after I'd turned on Google ads in my own feeds...!
It's strange though. When i create an ad with the word sex in it, i get an error from adwords saying i use forbidden words.
But this not only happens with rss feeds. I read an article on a news site couple a days ago, about somebody who died in a car accident. The google add was about car damage repair.