While You Are Reading About The Steroids Report, Here Are Some Related Products You Might Enjoy
Erick Schonfeld
31 comments »
The problem with automated advertising on news sites has always been the placing of inappropriate ads next to serious news issues. Take today’s report on steroid use in baseball. For at least a brief period, the story on CNN.com was matched with these “Ads by Google” shown at right trying to sell you the very steroids that the baseball commission is so upset about
What’s next? Ads for plutonium next to stories about nuclear proliferation?
I don’t see the steroid ads popping up anymore on that CNN page, so maybe someone at CNN (or Google) got wise to the inappropriate mismatch. (Although, if you were in the market for steroids, you would probably be reading such stories). But the same types of ads come up when you do a search for “steroids” on CNN.com:
This is not limited to CNN. Here are sponsored results for a similar search on the LATimes.com, which also shows Google ads:
OFFICIAL: Facebook drops ‘is’ !!!
“inappropriate” “shame” “naughty” are all constructs of the Puritan-American mind. Machines don’t understand those human abstractions.
Want more fun? Do an image search for steroids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.....ted_States
Why aren’t you reporting it to Google instead of blogging about it?
So sad… Google ads works sometimes.. They got me to buy a product the other day. I saw this site called http://www.beyondscents.com and bought a customized “mango” perfume for my girlfriend.
Sometimes the contextual ads are a lot less tasteful:
http://thedailywtf.com/Article.....amily.aspx
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On a related note, I noticed Yahoo’s automated news pulling an even more egregious move a few months ago - mixed up _content_. They display a photo next to a story that I assume their algorithm “intelligently” chooses, if the story itself doesn’t have a photo. There was a photo of Michael Moore next to story about Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Oops.
While seemingly innocuous in this instance, one can easily imagine a story about “a rapist, Charlie Arrington” and a photo of Michael Arrington sidled up to the headline “Arrington raped and killed 3.” It’s a libel suit waiting to happen.
409 pages is a long report but I found it easy to skim by following the “next” search for “bonds.” Still 103 hits takes a bit.
… and I really liked Bonds!
I have personally been called a “CEO on Steroids” myself, but I assure you I am clean.
Funny comments.
LOL… Charlie Arrington and Michael Arrington…
a horny rapist and murder of three show up Michael Arrington Picture.
I’m just amused that the ad from Yahoo! Shopping in the LA Times example has steroids misspelled.
You know what’s worse than bad contextual ads? Bad writing. Way to phone in an absolutely worthless post.
This is one of the worst posts I have ever read on techcrunch. Shockingly bad.
Barry Bond isn’t homerun record breaker. He full of battries and super human juices.
A homerun record breaker would be person who don’t use steriods.
Aaron Hank. He look pretty upset when he see Barry Bond killing his iconic frame and spoiling his baseball ego.
Remember the movie Rocky…
Ivan Drago is Berry Bonds
Aaron Hank is Rocky
If Aaron Hank was Young; he would compete Barry Bond’s blood juice. He would put fist fight. He would kill his homerun record. :/
Bada-bing!
[crickets chirping]
He’ll be here all next week, ladies and gentlemen!
DAAAAMNNN…..people wish Erick was fired.
Does anyone here like his off-topic blogs?
i own the domain allpheromones.com, does it interest someone? Id sell it for just 150 dollars…
just contact me… fede -at- genteloca.com
This is so true, i’ve seen this a lot but never really thought about it. I laughed sometimes at the things i saw on google ads.
“serious news issues”
I’m a sports fan myself - but is this really “serious news”?
If it isn’t against the Adsense TOS - what makes it so inappropriate?
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Isn’t that the point? Have two sides to every story?
This is VERY normal and all you can expect for a search/matching technology that has changed little from the original WebCrawler. Search engines and ad-systems that are built on it are basically matching word to word with some fancy hard coding to avoid things when it sticks out as in this case.
The way you get around that is to have the engines understand language. Understant the difference of ‘the party bombed’ meaning it sucked vs. it blew up into pieces.
Its called semantic based methods and it exists today (ex. http://www.hakia.com [i have nothing to do with them] ). Its yet not as mature enough but they are the way of the future for search and smart addssssssssss…
This is a common problem, like if you search for mobile phone health alerts, you’ll get ads for mobile phones.
This is good news for the industry. It shows that for all the profit Google and major publishers make with ads, there are still glaring opportunities to improve and make the ads even more targeted.
for what it’s worth, those sites don’t sell steroids. any site advertising “legal steroids” is a scam. at this point many prohormones are no longer allowed to be sold otc, and steroids have been banned for quite a while.
sure, those ads may be inappropriate, but they’re not “trying to sell you the very steroids that the baseball commission is so upset about.”
A good solution to this is HUMAN POWERED contextualization. This is the difference of boo-box in front of other marketing tools.
Check it out http://boo-box.com
Humans make much less contextualization errors than computers. We all know that computers are completely dumb in subjetive contexts.
Sorry for bad english.
from Brazil, Marco Gomes
CTO of the boo-box team
Most of the google ads are no longer pharmaceutical steroids only OTC supplements with names that sound like steroids.
Google Adwords makes it difficult for advertisers to post ads with “steroid-related” keywords. (I was not allowed to sell a reference book named Anabolics 2007 about steroids.) So, advertisers intentionally misspell “steroids” to bypass keywords prohibited by Google.
Several months ago, real pharmaceutical steroids were advertised in google ads accompanying articles and op-eds about the dangers of steroids and the irresponsibility of websites selling steroids. That was funny.
Victor Conte from BALCO likely made millions from Google Ads selling SNAC and ZMA that accompanied all the news stories reporting on his involvement, his prosecution, his imprisonment, etc. related to steroid scandal not to mention all the Barry Bonds stories connecting him to BALCO.
That is why Conte always has a big grin on his face.