Do Web Publishers Deserve Control over Their Ads?

If you are a web publisher or a blogger who uses ads for monetization, I am quite certain that you have heard some complaint at least once about your ads. Most frequently our visitors complain about the mere existence of such ads because the majority of web surfers simply hate them. But sometimes we also hear complaints about the content of our ads – how they are distracting, play music by default or simply advertise goods or services that seem to be improper to this or that visitor of a website.

The situation is getting even more difficult with international users because US advertisers only rarely want to push their products to international users same as they do to their target customers in the US. So international users are either left with local products or services (that rarely reach large US-based ad networks that work with smaller blogs and websites) – which is the best option – or with the usual smilies and “You are our 1,000,000^th visitor, click here to get your prize” terrible banners that rarely generate any revenue at all but are frequently used by ad networks as defaults for when they have nothing better to display.

Once I myself participated in a discussion on FriendFeed where a reader was criticizing a friend of mine (who is also a professional blogger) because even though he enjoyed one particular post a lot, the fact that he had to see the annoying and flashy banner with tons of smilies spoiled the entire impression for him. The worst part was that the friend of mine did not even realize such things happened on his blog at all: being and American and writing from the US he has never seen those ads on his blog himself and did not know the ad network he worked with displayed this to his international visitors.

Today I have seen one of the worst examples of how ads can spoil the impression from website content. Some of you may have heard about the terrible tragedy on the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, the largest in Russia and one of the largest in the world as well. On Monday for a reason that is yet to be investigated one of the generating units was destroyed and huge volumes of water poured into the generator hall. As a result 17 people are dead and more than sixty are still missing (with most certainly no chance to survive).

It is no wonder that this has been the most important topic here in Russia on all TV channels and on the web as well. The videos of the tragedy accumulate huge numbers of watchers easily but one of the most popular video sharing websites in Russia, properly named RuTube, has managed to get into quite a dubious situation because of one of such videos.

RuTube is monetized via short vide ads that precede some of the videos on the site – absolutely similar to its older brother, YouTube. And even despite of the fact that the website team has no control over the ads themselves, the fact that the video from the tragedy site was accompanied by an ad for well-known brand of tampons resulted in quite a number of negative discussions in the Russian blogosphere.

Ads on the website are only inserted into the videos that pass moderators of the website – so that only quality videos can be used to display ads and not to disappoint advertisers with poor videos. But after a video is moderated, an ad is added to such a video automatically based on settings defined by advertisers themselves (the usual targeting settings plus categories the videos belong to). There is no tool to moderate ads themselves and decide what ads will be added to what videos.

Of course on TV you don’t expect not to see ads – the usual ads for just about anything – after a news block, no matter if some tragedy is covered or not. And one can probably claim that since there’s no real difference between an online video website and TV, you should not be surprised by ads – even if some people find the advertised subject to be abusive.

But I have a feeling that there is some difference because online ads are good mostly because of the targeting opportunities that they offer – and in this particular case targeting was at the very least dubious (or did not exist at all so the advertiser selected to display the ad in all the available videos to all the users). And after moderating a specific video (like the one about this recent tragedy), I think that the team of moderators could think about either disabling ads on the video completely or at least choose some specific ads that would not offend anyone or suggest cynicism in the team’s behavior. But of course the moderators don’t have such practices in place – simply because people rarely think if ads are appropriate to the content they accompany.

So we will probably continue having various discussions about this or that inappropriate ad and some strange things advertised where you would never expect them to be. Of course larger websites in many cases have the necessary tools to disable ads or at least modify them so that no one will complain about how inappropriate such ads are.

But for smaller websites the situation is even worse as normally we just grab the code from an ad network we work with, paste it into our templates and forget about it because there’s really nothing we could do to influence what our visitors see. Only some ad networks make it possible to approve ads before they are displayed but you will not be able to define ads for specific pages anywhere so you will have to simply hope nothing inappropriate will appear.

And the reason for my worries is that our visitors actually take our ads as an integral part of our content in many situations so we are also to blame for what ad networks display, not only for what we write or otherwise make available to our visitors intentionally. So now my question is: do we deserve better tools to decide where and what ads should be shown on our websites or should we continue letting web surfers criticize us or simply leave to never come back again, because of what our ad networks choose to show them?