Is Google Homophobic? You decide..
One of my hosting clients has been having trouble with some of his sites lately – in that his Google Adsense revenue has gone down. As in, down the toilet quicker than a bad Indian Curry.
From clearing a couple of hundred few months ago, he’s barely scraping $50 for this month. That’s pretty shit.
It makes it worse that the hitrate for his site is about 5x as much as it was…
So i’ll stop rambling now, and get to the point: I wonder if Google, or someone there in charge of things, is homophobic and is blacklisting gay-themed sites.
There have been a few reports recently about Adsense’s unfairness to gay blogs and gay sites, and I fear this tune is all too similar.
Scott-O-Rama: Is Google going after Gay Blogs?
Best Gay Blogs/Gaytwogether: Is Google Adsense Antigay?
Gaytwogether seem to have removed all negative posts about their brush with google (after they complained loudly and google obviously didn’t like the noise), and the adsense is back on their site. Geez, how cheaply were you bought, boys?
There were also a couple of rumours I heard that some adsense keywords were costing some gay site upwards of $1, whereas a hetero site could get the same keywords for about 5 cents. Can’t find the link for that one, though.
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There are two parts to the www.plublogs.com site, the Topblogs section, and the Photoblogs section. The photoblogs section is the one that gets most of the traffic, but alas, is also the part that gets those stupid Public Service Announcements. The topblogs section is minor, but adsense shows up as it is supposed to. Same script, minimal differences. Strange, huh?
When I questioned Google, here’s part of their official reply on why his Adsense revenue now sucks ass, and why he gets PSA’s in the Photoblogs section:
‘Becky’: “Although the template is the same, please note that the text on the two pages are not exactly the same.
The differences in text may be causing public service ads to appear.”
Really, Becky. Is that so?
I logged into my server and decided to try a hunch: I made an alias of Plublogs’ Photoblogs directory – I called it Photoblogz. If anyone goes to this directory, it serves up exactly what is in the photoblogs directory.. but with that one letter of difference. The rest is IDENTICAL.
And oh surprise surprise, look what happened.
Hmm… was that a fluke? Let’s check a different page…
Oh, it happened again.
Lets see Google explain this with their bullshit excuse about adsense formulas..
Feel free to comment if you feel you’ve been fucked over too. The more the madder merrier.
Reply @ 23/3: Followup:
After some email ping-pong, here’s their final (evidently) reply:
Hello,
I’m Rajiv, one of AdSense’s tech specialists. Becky escalated your email to me.
We currently do not run paid Google ads on web pages that are determined to contain potentially mature or adult content by our automatic contextual advertising system — only Google ads categorized as ‘Family Safe’ by the AdWords team are available through the AdSense program at this time.
Because our system automatically classifies web pages based on the type of content, the ads appearing on the page you mentioned are public service ads, for which you do not receive earnings. At this time, we are unable to manually alter its page category in order to allow you to serve Google ads.
Apart from this I am unable to offer you more information as to how our ad targeting works and why some pages receive ads and others do not.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
Rajiv
The Google AdSense Team
I may be slightly naive here, but surely Adsense realise HOW MANY PEOPLE are searching for not quite FAMILY FRIENDLY search terms.
22.Mar.07 
Controversy, Strange
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People search for something other than porn?!
Wouldn’t surprise me if you had something there, man. Sounds like it might be true.