Good news on ads: Category Filter

I'm pleased to announce that Google AdSense has just extended the Category Filter to me. It's still in beta, but at Google a lot of things are "in beta" for years even when they work almost perfectly.

A Category Filter from a major player such as Google is the first step toward cleaning up the online ad industry as a whole. Granted, it will take a while for Google to refine the filter, for webmasters to become aware of it and for certain webmasters' audiences to pressure them into using it. Still, I think by the end of 2010, ads for dangerous or useless products and services will be the exception rather than the rule, Web-wide.

Some people are using the Category Filter only to block out low-earning categories and increase their eCPM ("effective cost per mille": income per thousand page views). Not me: I've got a social agenda to advance.

From now on, if the filter is working properly, you won't see ads in the following categories:

• Drugs & Supplements
• Get Rich Quick
  
• Religion
• Ringtones & Downloadables
• Weight Loss

(NB: For those not in the know, most of the supplements and weight loss products you find online are of questionable effectiveness, even if they're held to strong safety standards.)

Note that the Religion category specifically excludes astrology and "non-denominational spirituality". I will filter astrology (and numerology, tarot, aura readings, etc. etc.) if it becomes an option, but I'm undecided about "non-denominational spirituality" since it may include atheism, agnosticism and pantheism, all of which I consider part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

I was disturbed to learn, while I was setting up the filter, that Get Rich Quick had accounted for 90.2% of recent revenue and 8.4% of recent impressions. This tells me something's seriously wrong with either AdSense's customer base or the targetability of my blog. (Each other category on the filterable list accounted for zero revenue and 0.3% to 0.8% of impressions.)

For some reason, a publisher can only filter out five categories right now. One category I considered filtering and decided not to was Politics. If liberal and conservative politics could be filtered separately, I would filter conservative politics. But I feel a blanket ban on political ads would hurt the cause of those who genuinely want to reduce poverty and oppression, make rich people pay their share of the taxes, control human impact on the environment, and have governments spend less of taxpayers' money fighting wars, enforcing unnecessary drug laws and spying on their own people. Thus, I will instead try to make sure my blog's text attracts mostly the liberal left.

As I wrote previously, please feel free to comment below if you continue to see ads for any of the filtered categories above, plus any of the following:

• A product that's dangerous to you or your computer.
• A scraper site.
• Click fraud.
• Pseudoscience, quackery, cults, conspiracy theories or belief in the paranormal.
• Discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation or disability. (This doesn't include pride in and appreciation of a particular race's culture, or reasoned arguments about the relative merits of different cultures.)
• Conservative politics.
• An unaccredited college.
• Something that isn't available in the English-speaking country you're accessing Life User from, but doesn't say so in the ad text (especially if that country is Canada).
• Weapons with no legitimate defensive purpose and no genuine value as collectibles.
• Anything being sold using dishonest or grossly misleading claims.

Good news on ads: Category Filter