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"A recurring theme in the blogosphere the last few days has been the death of the Feedburner Ad Network (FAN) and it's replacement with Google's AdSense for Feeds. Adam noticed over the weekend that one of our articles on the Olympics spawned an advertisement for a \"Fitness for Gay Men\" advertisement. The advertisement was poorly targeted, definitely, a little risque, possibly.\u00A0 But if you scan the article intently, you can probably get that there were some crossover in the keywords (olympics, sports, jocks).\nBut today Pete spotted a particularly curious pairing of content and advertisement from our AdSense for FeedBurner. He sent me the following screenshot from Ben Parr's liveblog at the New Media Expo entitled \"What's the Future of Online Video?\":\n\nSo apparently, the future of online video (according to Google) is still porn. I can't say I'm surprised, but it's a bit more than annoying given the fact that AdSense functions on a system that doesn't pay out to us unless folks click on the banners, and given that we don't create content targeted towards the homosexual porn-surfing community, I don't imagine this ad is making us any money.\n\nAfter Pete sent me the screenshot, I did some research on the ad targetting foibles of AdSense, and decided to check out some our other posts in Google Reader to see what other stuff came up.\u00A0 Most of the ads that surfaced were all along the same lines, and moderately on topic in their targeting (whitelabel social networks and online Olympics coverage seemed pretty common), but a recurring ad that popped up was an advertisement for a ponzi-scheme called CrewBux:\n\nIf you need a refresher on Ponzi schemes, we talked about them a few weeks ago when the Department of Justice took down AdSurfDaily in connection with the actions pending against eGold:\nIn the case of AdSurfDaily, it operated under the thinly-guised motif of a \"paid auto-surf program,' a common term for modern Ponzi schemes. 'Advertisers' were enticed into the program by promises of a return on advertising dollars spent of 125% - 150%. To recieve the benefit of the full return on investment, advertisers also had to agree to view a few websites that would rotate every day.\nThese are the sorts of advertisements we'd never sell on our own - we've spoken pretty clearly on Ponzi schemes, and I don't think you could possibly construe any sort of affinity for multi-level marketing or Ponzi schemes in our body of editorial. I can't say I'm thrilled with the fact that illegal scams that are typically a vehicle for bilking innocent and naiive folks out of their money is associated with my writing, either.\nThe problem is obviously in the technology, and is something that never really seemed to come up under the FeedBurner Ad Network because there was a great deal of human selection and approval embedded in the process there (even their checks were handwritten).\nIt isn't as if this new replacement system has opened up RSS monetization for every user of FeedBurner in a way that FAN never could. You still must have a feed with a sufficient subscribercount for a certain period of time to qualify for AdSense for RSS feeds, so automation isn't really benefiting most publishers using the system.\n\n\n\nDick Costolo from dick costolo on Vimeo.\nSort of makes you wonder exactly what sorts of important new things they have former FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo working on these days (but explains the sad clown routine)."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/08/14/adsense-feedburner-bad-targeting/>