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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Google Adsense out of control

This is very bad news on the advertising front. I've noticed in the past few weeks some of the most annoying audio ads with bells and whistles (literally) and revving car engines and all sorts of sounds. This was happening on some of the most reliable and non obtrusive ad sites like 'digg' and 'fark'. The reason for this is simple: The utter failure of Google to control their advertisers.

What what once a staple of "non annoying" ads, Google's Adsense program, has slowly decended into the pit of annoying, "auto play audio" ads and maybe worse. First they started as just a text ad program, then they moved to images, then to click to play video and rich media ads, and finally to third party, unvalidated, wild west style ads. While they attempt to keep the publishers in charge with "Advertiser Reviewing", the tools they offer are less than adequate to even identify which advertiser is problematic.

I hope that Google will fix this problem or they will be losing a lot more publishers. They need to let publishers have finer grain control of what is permissible, and they need to strictly enforce ALL ads going through the network. If not, what is auto play audio today, will be rouge sypware installs and pc hijacking tomorrow.

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