I will not participate in Google’s interest-based advertising

March 13, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 36 Comments
Filed under: Advertising, Opinions 

I received an email from Google about a change in their Adsense advertising program.

Here is a brief excerpt from it:

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category….

I am totally opposed to this.

In the past, I have really liked Google Adsense, and one of the main reasons is that they analyze the pages with ads and try to serve the most relevant ads that match that content.

I don’t think they put cookies on visitors to those pages, but I’m not certain of this. In fact, I really didn’t think about this until they emailed me about this new interest-based advertising.

Now, however, they will be tracking visitor browsing and I don’t want to be a part of it.

In the past, Google had a mantra of “Do no evil.”

I think they’ve just crossed to the dark side.

I went to my Google Adsense account and opted out of this. I do not want to show any of their ads based on user interest categories.

I don’t care if it means I’ll earn less money from them.

There have been times when I’ve depended upon the money I make from their ads on my sites and I’ve always been happy to deposit their checks.

As long as I have a way to opt out of this new method of advertising they’re going to use, I’ll continue showing Adsense ads on my sites.

If they ever make it mandatory, I’ll close my Adsense account and remove their ads off all my websites, no matter how much money I’ll lose.

I am totally opposed to this and will not participate in their interest-based advertising.

Bad Google!

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , ,