I have a problem with google ads. Specifically, google ads can thwart the intentions of anybody who posts on any internet site which features them. For example, suppose that I hate the Acme Corporation and I write a long post bashing it. Google computers pick out the words “Acme Corporation” from my post and gives ads for products made by … the Acme Corporation. If someone clicks on those ads and buys the stuff, then my attack on the Acme Corporation has actually benefited the very corporation that I wanted to harm.
Obviously this isn’t limited to corporate situations. The same scenario could undermine a person attacking a politician or party, religious group, nonprofit, or just about anything.
Somewhat. The last company I was contracting to (in Japan) was doing language parsing, so it would try to determine that the subject of a sentence was and whether it was saying something good or bad about it. But this was still a single-sentence unit, so it would be able to tell that, “Disney sucks!” is negative towards Disney, but, “I saw Disney’s new movie, Alladin. This movie sucks!” would end up negative to “this movie”, without it knowing what “this movie” is.
You could administer your own website and not enroll in AdSense. It’s not mandatory to the internet or anything. If you are posting on a website owned by someone else then you really don’t have any right to complain. I suppose you could try to convince the administrators of that site to stop using Google ads.
Or you could just not worry about it. If your complaint against the advertised entity is substantial and valid, then it doesn’t matter if lots of other people learn about them, because they should be able to discover for themselves that “[whatever] sucks”. Really, the most likely kind of attacks to be ‘undermined’ by the unvarnished truth, are unfair attacks.
Heck, in some cases having an add for the product will reinforce the message that it sucks such that next time you see that add you will remember and associate it with the complaint about the company.
Sort of like that cruise commercial that uses the song, “Lust for Life”. If everyone were to learn the actual lyrics to the song, then every time they see the commercial they would associate it with liquor, drugs, and flesh machines. Not exactly what someone is looking for in a family cruise.
Interesting bit of ironic recursion: Just before I posted this, one of the Google ads at the bottom of the page was “Beat the AdWords System.” Which rather supports the thesis of the OP.
Depends on how many viewers are like myself, and don’t even see the ads. For me, they are part of the background noise, and I would have to make a deliberate effort to actually look at them.
