Google ads on ST

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dan Robinson
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Dan Robinson

What is up with the increasingly disturbing, raunchy and completely irrelevant Google Ads popping up on StormTrack (especially some of the dating sites)? I'm not comfortable contributing posts and information when they're being associated with/used to direct traffic to those sites.

Maybe some competitive ad filter maintenance is in order? The worst ads are usually the graphical banners rather than the text, though I see a few questionable text ones every once in a while too.
 
Dan Robinson said:
What is up with the increasingly disturbing, raunchy and completely irrelevant Google Ads popping up on StormTrack (especially some of the dating sites)? I'm not comfortable contributing posts and information when they're being associated with/used to direct traffic to those sites.

Maybe some competitive ad filter maintenance is in order? The worst ads are usually the graphical banners rather than the text, though I see a few questionable text ones every once in a while too.
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I will 2nd what Dan said. This is getting pretty ridiculous. It looks like the ST site is starting to cater, condone, and/or promote porn and other related type sites.
 
We don't have control of the ad stream. If you see a questionable ad, right-click it, choose "Copy Link Location", paste it somewhere that you can read it, like Notepad or your browser address bar, and look for the domain following adurl= . Post that in this thread. I'll go to our Google Adwords account and manually block it.

Unfortunately this is not something we can just take down completely since the ads are largely funding the web hosting.

Which ads exactly are promoting porn?

Tim
 
I'd personally like to object to the lack of porn related google ads. IMO ST needs more of them.
 
Tim Vasquez said:
Which ads exactly are promoting porn?

Tim
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Yeah, it'd be interesting to hear what these even are, since I can't recall seeing any. I've spent the last 30 minutes or so trying to find one by clicking thread after thread and have yet to see anything. We should start a thread just for porn, see what ones we can get to pop up with our text.
 
Mike Hollingshead said:
Yeah, it'd be interesting to hear what these even are, since I can't recall seeing any. I've spent the last 30 minutes or so trying to find one by clicking thread after thread and have yet to see anything. We should start a thread just for porn, see what ones we can get to pop up with our text.
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I have to think that "promoting" porn is a bit of an exaggeration. I've seen some of the "singles dating" ads, which can be a bit raunchy I guess if you don't visit many other sites that use graphic ads (Snorg Tees ads, anyone?) LOL. As Tim said, he'll need specific examples if he wants to filter them out. Of course, what one finds to be raunchy is highly subjective, I suppose.

I have seen some very irrelevant ads, however. For example, this one just came up in a B&G thread... It's not pornographic or raunchy, but it's certainly irrelevant to storm chasing (although it's a bit funny, IMO)!
badad1.png


I don't think I've seen too many irrelevant text ads, so why not just remove all graphic ads in place of text-only ads (which seem to show up much more often anyway)? Nearly all the text ads I've seen have at least some relevancy to tornadoes, shelters, insurance agencies, or other such things that are directly or indirectly related to storms, tornadoes, chasing, etc; a few text ads I've seen lately have been relatively irrelevant and unrelated to chasing, but text ads tend to be much more inconspicuous.
 
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I filtered out that ad. It will take a few hours before the block takes effect. I hope we get some ads that are more on target, like nudewxworxrepair.com.

Tim
 
This one just showed up.

http://www.bbwromance.com


I've still found zero ads suggesting ST is at all "promoting and/or condoning pornographic things". Is the gay chubby dating and this one all that this thread was over?

Bueller?
 
Well, "bbwromance.com" and "gaychubbydating.com" are definitely catering to sexual encounters. This is absolutely not appropriate content for Google to be serving up to general audiences, esp. if they come up as banners with many of you checking on ST at work and wanting things to look above board.

I will continue to work on filtering those, and will try to raise some hell with Google about this trend. Continue submitting any sex-related domains you see to this thread and I'll block them. If nothing works we'll probably turn off graphic banners.

Tim
 
Thank you Tim for taking care of this and verifying it.
I for one, would be glad to pay a reasonable yearly fee to ST for access if it is deemed necessary to eliminate the banner ads. I may be wrong, but I cannot imagine those kind of sites generating that much revenue for ST.
That way if any of the others wish to see more porn, maybe they can have it placed on their own sites and just go looking for it. Everyone to their own. If that is what they want, go for it.
 
There are several others that are popping up here from time to time, those two have been most prominent. FWIW this is not unique to ST. I had to remove certain types of ads from my own site (namely the single-line link ads, the narrow horizontal bar type) because some VERY graphic stuff was showing up there.

It's pretty frustrating, as I always thought Google was trustworthy when it came to keeping this stuff out. Unfortunately in the past 6 months this, along with ad irrelevancy (and respective clickthrough pay rates), has been getting worse. I haven't added the ads back to my redesigned site, not sure I ever will now. I was making a little from it, but not enough to deal with babysitting them looking for questionable or just off-the-wall stuff.
 
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