Adult Content defined by Google Adsense

Posted by Rainer on November 30th, 2007 at 09:37am

Ever since it started, Google AdSense prohibited adult content. Explicit nudity, for example, was (and is) way beyond Google’s terms of service.

But of course, there is a lot of content that is bordering on the mature content line. In fact, some webmasters play the gamy of trying to get more page views by intentionally bordering on that line. I suspect, they get their revenue from advertisers who are also close to violating the AdWords TOS. AdWords, too, prohibits explicit ads.

Google seems now to go after them. The have written an interesting post in their blog: “Inside AdSense: Play it safe, family-safe“. In short, Google replaces the “explicit” term with “familiy-safety”. This in itself is more explanatory. But Google also provides a view good questions that a webmaster should ask himself:

Would I be comfortable viewing this content with my parents or children in the same room? Would I feel comfortable viewing this content if my boss walked up behind me while I had this content on my screen?

Of course, the level of comfortability varies from person to person. But I think the questions pretty much get to the point.

And if I may engage in some wild guessing: Google’s blog post could be the beginning of a campaign against webmasters (probably as well as advertisers) playing the “mature content game”. It looks a bit like Google is cleaning up its portfolio, just like they began to seriously penalize paid links. So if you have close-to-adult material and you are running AdSense ads, its probably a good time now to reconsider using AdSense.

From a general point of view (as citizen,  parent(!) and AdWords advertiser, …) I think I welcome this change. I don’t like explicit AdWords ad to come up on my site. And I don’t like my family-friendly ads come up on explicit sites.

Under adsense