News & Views
Look, mum: no ads
By Terry Freedman
Thu, 16 Feb 2006, 17:44

Observant visitors to this website will notice that I have got rid of the Google advertisements. Read on to find out why.

I was attracted to Google Ads for three main reasons:

• It involved no ongoing maintenance work on my part (or so I thought). The idea is that you just stick a piece of Javascript code on the pages (or, in my case, the templates) where you want advertisements to appear, and sit back and watch the money roll in.
  
• That brings me on to the next point. I liked the idea of earning some money from advertising. Given that this website has quite a high volume of traffic, especially considering that it's very much a niche website and that I don't advertise in the traditional sense, I thought: "why not make some money from it?" Why not indeed, especially taking into account...
  
• ... the fact that, because the advertisements are generated automatically, I wouldn't need to worry about people thinking I endorsed a product or service just because it appears on my website. It's very important to be seen to be independent as well as to actually be independent.
  
• It would enable me to provide a service to visitors by ensuring that only advertisements relevant to their needs would appear on the site.

So, in the light of all these positives, why have I decided to get rid of them? In no particular order:

• I think they make the pages look messy. Whatever style of ad I tried, and whatever the colour scheme, they still looked unsightly to me. I think people don't have the time to try to find the information they want as it is, without being distracted by flashy advertising.
  
• It is not maintenance-free. Google ads works on the basis of keywords. It's actually quite clever in a way, but it sometimes picks up on the wrong word to use as a keyword, or assigns it too much or too little importance. A good example of this could be seen in my review of Rate My Teacher. Picking up on the word "rate", Google Ads threw up advertisements for cheap loans and bargains on Ebay. Each time it happened, I had to enter that website on a banned list. But there are thousands if not millions of such websites! Who needs the hassle?
  
• I feel uneasy about the stuff Google is doing in China. I haven't quite made my mind up about this: there is an argument to say that the more western companies get involved in countries which are not as open as ours, the more likely it is that they will gradually become more open. Unfortunately, that intellectual argument doesn't seem to reach the unease I feel, so I decided to follow my feelings rather than my intellect on this one. I feel like a hypocrite, becuase I still think Google provides great services, and I have liked the search engine ever since 1998, or thereabouts, when it first made its appearance oin beta form. And I especially like it because, if you enter "ICT in education", this website comes out on top -- and without my resorting to artifical means of driving it up!

For me -- and I offer this to teachers who would like to have an inroad into discussing moral issues with their students -- it reinforces what I have always known: that,  ultimately, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Using Google Ads requires time for maintenance and, even more importantly, also currently involves making a moral choice.

© Terry Freedman Thu, 16 Feb 2006