November 14, 2005
Ridiculousness of AdSense ads
It seems like the majority of Google AdSense ads are absolutely ridiculous. Most are plagued with bad grammar and make little, if any, sense at all. Additionally, a wonderful winning feature of AdSense–its targeted nature–is undermined by the ads that wealthy advertisers put out. For example:
Hotmail.com
Looking for Hotmail.com?
Find exactly what you want today
www.eBay.com
Obviously, that ad is going to lead to nothing useful. So why is it that eBay owns every keyword in existence? If you search for something, you get ads for eBay. I’m sorry–I’m not buying registered domain names or used parrots on eBay. I’m sure eBay ads also pay very little, which is a major hurt to publishers who would like some decent ads to show up on their sites.
The answer: Google makes money from it. However, this seems conflictive with Google’s mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” seeing as these types of advertisements are not information, but rather merely misleading nonsense.
Comment by Nick — Posted November 14, 2005 at 23:37
I started laughing when I looked at the quote. Don’t think I want to go to Ebay to find Hotmail.
However, yeah. I have to agree that all of the eBay ads on AdSense are annoying.