Complaints from paying advertisers carry way more weight than the algorithm, don’t you think?
Cite for the manually screening part?
Do you know how much margin that particular business group makes. Surely you must realize that they have to independently make money and that how much Google makes as a whole is irrelevant.
Anyway, my main point still stands. If you don’t like how they do business, don’t do business with them. Hell, start your own advertising service and run things however you want.
Isn’t a lot of TVTropes’ own, on-site content directed towards advertising, as well as ad-supported media like television?
Wouldn’t fewer people develop skepticism about such media if TVTropes didn’t exist to frame media products in the way it does?
Google is big business because of advertising. TVTropes, arguably, makes people less susceptible to advertising.
I’ve seen nothing that suggests they’re targeting TVTropes’ free speech rights, but wouldn’t it be in Google’s self-interest, and those of their business partners, to do so quietly and deniably?
Once again, they can’t possibly be suppressing TVTrope’s free speech rights because they are not the Government.
Nitpick. They can take a good shot at driving the site out of business, which is the point.
If advertisers complain at all, probably yes. But do they complain, or do they just opt not to have their ad served on sites they don’t like?
By not supporting them with advertising? Really? Are they blocking them from getting financing/advertising elsewhere? Are they setting up a competing venture?
Do you and others really think that Google should be forced to advertise on TVTropes or any other site regardless of their content?
Whaaa? Google has it in their power to yank ad revenues from TVTropes, and that potentially could kill the site, which would be goody-goody-gumdrops for Google in ways they probably wouldn’t care to admit. That’s all I meant to say.
To yank their own ad revenues from TVTropes. Sure. If it were only for reasons that they think that they are competing ventures, I would have no problem with it. Do you?
I don’t know Google’s ad guidelines or TVTropes’, so I’ll recuse myself here.
I’ve no reason to suspect Google of being that evil. Do you know something I don’t?
If they can’t actually tell if someone is violating their ridiculous rules or not, that’s yet another reason why they should be condemned for having them.
Ah, the standard right wing, free market fundamentalist argument that you only have rights with regards to the government. Which of course makes the whole concept of rights useless. What does it matter who is doing the censoring?
Turnabout is fair play. If free speech and fairness don’t matter, if censoring TV Tropes is OK, then why not force Google to advertise where it doesn’t want to? Turnabout is fair play. And force them to make all the advertisements variations on how awful Google is. Let’s see how they like someone barging in and telling them what they can and can’t say.
You can’t go around arguing that fairness doesn’t matter for TV Tropes but DOES matter for Google.
What they are doing to TV Tropes is evidence of how evil they are.
It’s evidence of them enforcing their policies. Are their policies themselves evil?
You’re probably correct, but you can’t be sure.
When you set up an adsense account, you only get ONE account and then you can apply it to all websites you own.
So let’s say I own Coyote.Com and I apply to adsense. They approve my content and all is right.
I can now take that code and add it to any other site I own. So I can take that code and put it on my other site RoadRunner.Com and it’ll work. But if RoadRunner.Com contains unacceptable content, Google will pull it if they find out.
Google’s Adsense is not good in the sense, Google’s decisions seem to always take the line of least resistance.
I set up a site for a man with a blog type content, that was very anti celebrities. He would review their movies and he didn’t like anything. The worst I could see he ever wrote, is something like “Geez everything this actor does SUCKS. Why do people keep hiring him.”
Google replace adsense with Public Service Ads, and the only answer we could get out of them, is a quote that said “Adsense cannot be used on site that promote hate.”
OK yeah, I guess his site promoted hate? No it was a site were he said he disliked actors works and pointed out why he didn’t like them. I guess for Google saying negative things costantly was hate speech or more likely Google didn’t want to be bothered with complaints so it was easier to pull the ads then be bothered with it.
Yes. As has been pointed out repeatedly, actually widely enforcing them would shut down pretty much all of the internet. They are bad rules being enforced badly.
I think it was the Hapsburgs who were characterized as “tyranny moderated by incompetence”; that’s what this looks like to me. With TV Tropes getting the tyrannical end of the stick.
Ridiculous. Participation is optional. Nobody is tyrannised by an authority that can simply be ignored.
Google doesn’t owe support to websites. It’s incumbent on the individuals who want a site to make sure it can survive.
They are free to have the most inconsistent, ridiculous rules that they want to have so long as they don’t violate any Civil Rights laws. You are free not to use their service if you don’t like their rules. If enough people feel like you do, they may change their rules.
This is Bizarro World stuff. Google isn’t telling people what they can and can’t say. They are telling them what you can and can’t say if you want to use their product. You can raise your funding some other way or fund yourself.
Google is the one giving money to TVTropes so the two are not equivalent. The equivalent would be forcing TVTropes to change their policy and take the ads and not have the choice to decline both.
Fine. Arguably they are evil. You shouldn’t patronize them. Use bing as your search engine and Yahoo! mail and banner ads for advertising.
Shut down the internet? How are they shutting down the internet? Is cnn.com going to disappear if Google stops Adsense? So it’s Google’s job to fund all of the world’s message boards now regardless of content?
Why is it Google’s responsibility to keep TVTropes alive? If someone else came along that paid better ad revenues should TVTropes be force do keep Adsense?
Nonsense. Clearly it can’t just be ignored. Economic power is just as real and just as coercive as political power. You can censor with money at least as easily as you can censor with a bunch of guys with guns.
So what’s the solution? Force Google to place ads on sites that neither they, nor their paying customers wish to?