I both earn money from AdSense and pay Google for ad space – so seeing a terrible looking ad on my blogs and getting exposure hurts. If you do visit a couple of Australian food blogs, eventually you’ll be served up with this diet ad – as Simon mentions over at his site:
You might build a beautiful, minimalist site and advertisers ruin it with an ad that may well have been drawn by their own child. If you’re a food blogger, you generally get served bad ads from Adsense because the price that advertisers pay is based on (amongst other things) the competition for the keywords that you use on your site. In Australia, there is virtually no competition for food-related keywords and so food-related sites tend to attract the bottomfeeders who will pay 5 cents a click for any traffic that they can hoover up.
If you don’t want to see that ad on your site, login to Adsense, go to Adsense setup > Competitive Ad Filter and block them. It’s that easy.
Then sign up for the AdSense Ad Review Centre and filter out the entire categories of Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification, Drugs & Supplements, Get Rich Quick, Weight Loss; and any of the other spammy categories that you choose. You’ll probably take a hit to your revenue and it won’t stop everything but it will serve up a better experience to your audience.
hi phil, thanks for the info. i’m sure it will be helpful to many who didn’t know about this. i think my ads are in the form of reviews. so even though i’m actually not getting paid for it i might be getting a free meal or product sample. although i’m starting to realise that the time it takes to attend a restaurant, eat the meal, take the photos, download the photos, retouch the photos, write the review and post the review takes a lot more time and effort than what the actual meal or product sample is actually worth. so in reality the restaurants are more the winners. but i still enjoy it because food is a passion for me and i love finding places that serve excellent food, which is preferably good value as well. :-)
I subscribe to a lot of blogs via Google Reader, and recently have noticed that there is a massive increase in adverts in articles if you view them in your feed reader. I am subscribed to this blog via Google Reader and actually noticed an advert at the bottom of your article.
Is it normally the blogger that chooses to have adverts in their feed, or is it the feed provider (e.g. FeedBurner, FeedBlitz) that gives you the option to put adverts in? Or is it just the feed service that puts in adverts for their service (which I assume means any revenue generated goes to them).
I totally don’t have a critical stance on the issue, just curious. I’m not a big fan of them but it’s easy to scroll past.
Gem – you add the ads into your feeds via AdSense, or with a plugin for your blog. Thanks for pointing them out in my feed – I’d forgotten about them entirely because they earn about $3 a month. They’re gone now.
I have a food blog in development – i how blocked all weight loss/diet adds. I dont think this is a good look for a food website – do you think this will hurt my adsense revenue?