So far, most of the Google Adsense ads are public service announcements or pitching mailing lists. What will management here do if the ads don’t change, and even after the site have been crawled we’re still seeing ads that read “robust mailing list solutions to monetize your registration partyershops” and whatnot? What if the ads don’t change?
They’d better change. If I were new here and I saw those ads, I’d assume this place was really cheap, and I don’t mean money-wise.
GET YOUR SPAMWARE HERE!
Tacky. Really really tacky.
As Google crawls the board, the ads should be more context-sensitive. However, it’s a process that will take some time.
You worry too much.
TubaDiva
???
What’s so intrinisically eeee-vil about ads for mailing list suppliers? I went to one of their websites, and it’s actually quite fascinating, to think of this whole other industry that does nothing but supply mailing lists to sellers looking to exploit a particular market niche like “Hispanic grocery store shoppers”. If they don’t change–so what?
I hang at the Bad Astronomy BB (now BAUT), and one of the perennial fascinations is watching the way the GoogleAds do change to reflect what’s in the thread. They are frequently hilariously (ir)relevant–ads for astrology websites and “getcher free horoscope here!” for example.
Right now the BAUT “Universe Today Story Comments” forum is featuring ads for bulletin boards, the cork kind that you hang on your wall. “Bulletin boards”, get it?
And the main forums page has an ad for a Creationist homeschooling science curriculum. Believe me, Elmwood, when those kind of ads start appearing here, you will be praying to the Invisible Pink Unicorn for the return of the mailing list ads. 
If you were new here, and saw those ads, and assumed that it meant this place was cheap and tacky, that would show that you didn’t understand how the ads work. When you sign up for GoogleAds, you don’t get much choice of content, other than to block specifically obnoxious ads like XXX–we’ve discussed this many times at the BABB. And if you start blocking too many ads, Google gets upset. Thus the Bad Astronomer–and Fraser at BAUT–just put up with all the “Nostradamus Online!” and Apollo hoax ads, both of which are currently being featured at BAUT. I can remember even seeing ads for Hoagland and Hovind’s websites on the BABB in the past.
And the rationale for how the GoogleAd bots choose to display which ads has eluded us completely; we’ve experimented extensively over there with thread content, to try to get it to display particular ads, and so far, no soap.
So y’all might as well sit back and enjoy.
And in light of all the discussion of Adblock, it came to me that I should clarify that when I said, " And if you start blocking too many ads, Google gets upset", I meant the website owner blocking ads that he finds distasteful, not individual users. AFAIK Google doesn’t have any issues with whether people visiting the website block the ads–all they care about is whether the website’s owner is living up to his part of the bargain in allowing the ads to display, period.
Does this mean that Google lets you play games with the ads? They don’t notice? Not that anyone here should start playing games with them.
Not as far as we could tell. We made extensive experimentation with posting certain words or phrases repeatedly in a thread, and nothing ever happened. We were never able to establish any kind of cause-and-effect, other than the obvious empirical observation that threads about UFOs, for example, would result in ads for UFO websites, and threads in which creationism was discussed would result in ads for creationist stuff.
As far as Google objecting to it–I don’t see how they could. They don’t have any way of monitoring how people who visit a website respond to the ads, and I don’t see how they could tell whether the word “badger” was repeated 100 times in a thread as a normal course of discussion, or whether someone simply posted “badger” 100 times to see what would happen.
The only feedback we were given was that Phil Plait said that he wasn’t allowed to discuss how Google decided which ads to run–i.e. how the bots actually work–and that he wasn’t allowed to personally block more than “some” of the ads by using their URLs, which as website owner he was privileged to do. When the first woowoo sites started appearing on the ads, naturally we collectively raised a ruckus, and that was the response we were given–“it’s part of the deal, live with it”.
And as I mentioned, it actually got to be quite fascinating, and amusing, to see what oddball ads would sometimes appear, and the strangely literal ways they’d be connected to the thread. We had a couple of threads of collections of “spottings”.