All Adsense are now anti-SOPA | Hacker News Reader

All Adsense are now anti-SOPA

53 pointscloudwalking19 comments

I've noticed that all of the Adsense I'm seeing are anti-SOPA, rather than ad content. For example, see TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/

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Here is a screenshot: http://reedmorse.com/tmp/sopa-adwords.png

Try cleaning your browser cache and Flash local storage - most likely you've been browsing a lot of anti-sopa content (not completely unrelated ;) - http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/geoip.png )

The best anti-sopa ad I've seen this morning (12h ago) when following a link to Forbes and there was an overlay ad covering the whole browser window in dark gray (marked as Advertisement in the title but no further text, only gray) - either Forbes did this themselves or somebody is spending some money to get the message around to Average Joe.

> Forbes

> Average Joe

???

I have no idea what I am supposed to be looking at. What in that screenshot is the important bit?

What's also intriguing about aw3c2's message is how his/her question clearly demonstrates how our brains have trained themselves to ignore banner ads.

I read TC every day and it took me a little bit before I realized that the huge banner ad at the top and the one on the right were a) there and b) anti-SOPA.

Cheers! I am actually a non-javascript plus adblocking person. That website is really LOUD and obnoxious with so much contrast and huge text, I have no idea what is content, what is not, what is important, what is RANDOM BIG WORDS.

Right side, under "Got a tip? Tell us."

Also at the top, next to the TC logo. (Did you miss that one? :)

Title should be changed to Adsense since it's only properties on the Google Display network.

Also, a very possible explanation could be that they're only showing those ads by targeting pages that show SOPA content. The display network is HUGE and it would be a big ticket purchase for Google to buy-out the entire network themselves (they still have to pay the sites). Are there any examples of this showing up on non-tech, non-sopa related sites? If so, please include them. If not, you're probably just seeing Google buy targeted ads around a subject (SOPA) and paying for them on their own network. Not unheard of, as they've done similar things with Chrome, etc

I dont see the same ads on TechCrunch in India. My guess is Google is running an Adwords campaign in US to make people sign the petition. I have seen them run campaigns for chrome, gmail etc. before.

Edit: I do see the ads on www.Wired.com though.

Same here - I'm in Canada. No anti-sopa ads on techrunch but they are on wired.

And suddenly I can't recall any site that actually uses AdWords from the top of my head, so that I could check if it's true :(. Any links to verify?

I'm pretty sure Google search results included ads at one point in time. It's been so long since AdBlock Plus came out I don't know if they still do.

Not true, visit any random site, preferably non-tech. Most Adsense ads are normal.

Click on any article on TechCrunch, and you'll see that they're not showing the anti-SOPA ads against actual content pages. I'm guessing that they're only doing this at the top level pages of these sites; possibly paying the sites for the space themselves.

Could this be 'remarketing' http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html?

This is probably the right answer.

Not actually sure if this is true. I'm trying to find more websites that use Adwords, but I don't actually know who uses which ad platform...

They bought some ad space on tech blogs, that's all. I don't see SOPA-related ads from Google on any other sites.

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