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.

RSS advert looking for sex attack victims next to a story about a Great Dane dog jumping up at joggers in a park

2 Comments

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.

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