Should Ads Be Disabled on Hubs About Sensitive Political Topics?

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  1. LauraGT profile image85
    LauraGTposted 11 years ago

    I was pretty surprised that ads were disabled on my recent post about Akin's "legitimate rape" comment. Rape, although sensitive, seems to be an important issue to discuss and learn about.  And, certainly, a politician's ridiculous comments about it should be examined.

    Do you think merely the mention of "rape" should make advertisers run the other way?

    1. relache profile image72
      relacheposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Unfortunately what we think tends to have no bearing on advertisers actions.

      1. LauraGT profile image85
        LauraGTposted 11 years agoin reply to this

        darn advertisers!   Well, I guess i also wonder how much of it is hubpages being conservative about it versus advertiser policies.  I suppose it's in our own best interest to be conservative, just no fun when a hub getting lots of hits has no ads!

  2. relache profile image72
    relacheposted 11 years ago

    You can ask admin to manually review your Hub and see if they re-enable ads, but overall there are filters in place to disable ads on topics which AdSense bans or about which they are touchy to protect both your and HubPages advertising accounts.

    Unfortunately those filters trigger on educational discussions of rape because sometimes those discussions contain frank sexual details and because text-scanning robots can't separate a legit discussion from Internet porn rape fantasy fiction.  I used to date a guy who worked for a major search engine, and he said that if in doubt, the SEs will throw the baby out with the bath water to keep their ad revenues safe.

  3. Mighty Mom profile image77
    Mighty Momposted 11 years ago

    I never noticed till you raised the issue that my hub (one of my most popular over time) on rape does NOT have ads other than the Amazon.com ads I placed myself.
    Of course, I didn't write it to make money anyway...

    Honestly, it's difficult to imagine what kind of product or service other than rape counseling would be appropriate for a hub on "rape."

    Your hub is not primarily about rape per se but about a clueless politician's barbarian views on rape and rape victims.
    You do use the word "rape" more than once. So no doubt it got blocked for ads because of that.

    1. LauraGT profile image85
      LauraGTposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I actually can think of a lot of topics related to rape that would be legitimate: psychological impact; rape culture/images in our society; safety issues; hotline services.  To me, it's a public health issue.  Since 1 in 3 (or 4, depending on the stat) American women are the victims of sexual assault at some point in their lives, so I think it's a very valid topic.

      Hubpages staff has already reviewed, and will not enable ads.  sad

      1. peeples profile image94
        peeplesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

        I have the same problem on a few of mine about the same topic. What really gets me is when I visit countless sites for survivors of rape and there are google ads there. I have actually never found a survivor site that didn't have google ads. I guess long run it's just knowing that somewhere out there hopefully someone will be helped by the hub. That makes it worth no ads.

        1. Mighty Mom profile image77
          Mighty Momposted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Have you brought this discrepancy to the Hub Pages team?
          If there are other sites out there discussing the subject that do include Google Adsense ads, that would (I imagine) be reason to reconsider policy here.
          MM

      2. Marisa Wright profile image86
        Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

        Of course they are.  However, we have to comply with the limits set by Google Adsense.  The robots who police their rules are dumb:  they can't read the sense of an article, so all they do is scan for "prohibited" words.  The result is that an academic article on sex is just as prohibited as a pornographic article about sex.  There's nothing we can do about that, other than publish such works on a site which doesn't rely on Adsense.

        It does seem that HubPages errs on the safe side when applying the Adsense rules.  However, I can't blame them because if HP lost the ability to show Adsense ads, it would collapse - so it's vitally important to their survival.

 
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