Should the New York Times be responsible for its Google ads?
Stinky Journalism has an investigative report out today highlighting the fact that NYTimes.com has been displaying advertisements touting sleazy health claims that it has decried in past editorials.
An article “With Resveratrol, Buyer Beware” published in the Science section of the New York Times on Aug. 18 takes aim at various Web advertisers—specifically age-reversing drug supplement companies—hawking their wares using deceptive cyber practices. However, omitted from the story is that The New York Times itself is at best nonchalant in its ad screening practices, and at worst complicit in trafficking these same deceptive Web sites–not disclosing the conflict they are lining their own pockets with ad revenue from this scam.
But where are these ads being displayed? Through contextual advertising from Google, it seems (though at least one didn’t come from Google). Given that Google is a third-party advertiser that is serving up the ads independently from the New York Times, should the Times be as responsible for these ads as they are for ones they place on their own?
Based on my own experience with Adsense, I know you can reject ads that are appearing on your site, but because of the contextual nature of them it’s not always easy to keep track of the hundreds of ads that are served up when users come in from different searches. You could be running sleazy ads in your archives that you didn’t know existed. So it seems unfair to expect the newspaper to keep track and squash every single questionable ad being served up by Google.
Hi, thanks for reading our post. Today’s post has a quote from the Times that I believe answers your point–at least provides the Times view:
“After our complaint, Ms. Serphos wrote StinkyJournalism (Aug 21): ‘We will discuss with Google and their AdSense for Publishers team how we can prevent unacceptable products (like Resveratrol) from getting on the site via the text ad program. At the same time, we will work with our Ad Network associates to determine which network violated our terms in multiple ways: by accepting ads from products we don’t allow (i.e. Resveratrol), but also by deploying targeting technology that resulted in the ad being positioned opposite highly relevant content.’ ”
The above is quoted from http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/editordetail.php?id=431
Hope that helps.