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Comment by ladberg | Hacker News Reader

Since it seems like the poster works for the company: the ads on this article are all semi-nsfw for me, more-so than the average GAd I see (is that something you can tune?). I reported them to Google but that might be a black hole.

Additionally, why in the world does a technical blog for a for-profit company need ads?

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I got ads for LEGOs because I have kids and have recently searched for LEGOs [this is less of a humblebrag and more of a sigh at how old and boring I've gotten.]

I'm curious if the degree of ad personalization varies by site (do some sites show more personalized ads?). Or maybe the average demographic of a site's viewers is somehow factored in?

The site uses in the code the javascript for Google Ads and GoogleAnalytics, so probably you searched for LEGOs in Google search. Or was in other search engine using Google Chrome?

The Google Ads algorithm is not exactly known, there are guessings, but the so called "auction" that made you to see it probably is not page content related.

Hello,

It's a blog post by one of our engineers. Authors are free to monetize their content without inference from the company.

That sounds like a smart way to get your engineers to take the time for writing! I do assume you all do at least a basic suitability and security review, though?

Of course. Only Adsense is authorized. After a short investigation, it appears that the main reason these NSFW-limit ads are shown is because the article includes direct link to the PixLab NSFW API Endpoint (https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=nsfw) which is basically a bridge to our ML model that let you detect whether an image or video frame contains adult, bloody or gore content.

Sorry if that came across like I was questioning that part of your process, I was more curious in the actual process, but it is neat that you guys already managed to figure that out!

Getting shitty ads is a by-product of privacy consciousness.

When I stopped clearing my cookies periodically, the ad quality went WAY up.

Also, I'm guessing that image processing is moderately related to porn.

Same here

I got three images, two of pretty college women, and a third one that I can’t tell exactly what it is, but it’s skin color and my first impression was very NSFW

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