Recently, I stumbled onto a post that I really enjoyed. Thomas Baekdal broke down the type of ads he’s found on sites thanks to Google AdSense that are either irrelevant, spam or adult related, and he notes that they are increasing in frequency.
You might think that I am exaggerating the problem, but I found that spam, scam, phishing and adult ads accounts for a staggering 36% of all the ads on this site. The irrelevant (but non-spam) ads account for a further 7%. And, a single company accounted for 18% of all the spam ads.
Spam and spyware ads are bad enough, but I am absolutely annoyed by the adult ads.
He includes a variety of screenshots to prove his point, and just to drive it home for those that still don’t agree with him, he’s included some text from others with the same complaints.
The best part though is the fact that AdSense is still in the far right hand side of his site. So the question becomes, even if AdSense did become the home of only “junk” ads, would we still plaster it on our sites to make a dime or two here and there?