Another brick in the wall

I don't often talk about Kathy Shaidle's relapsed catholic, though it's a site I read from time to time. I've taken quite an interest, though, in her ongoing difficulties with Google's ad program.

Background: Google asks bloggers to add a bit of code that posts ads on their blogs, the blogger gets a little something for clickthroughs. The clickthrough payments don't apply to PSAs for charities, but just for actual ads for commercial products. From time to time, and more often than not on the heels of a post that might be taken as something other than enthusiastic support for all things fabulous and queer, Miss Shaidle's ads are pulled and replaced with PSAs. The reason given was that her site was "potentially negative". Her ads vascillate between commercial (and potentially remunerative) ads and the PSAs.

There's been some further commentary about this at Chez Shea where, in rejecting Mark's request to enter the Google ad program, Google said that "the ads would not provide a valuable experience for your site's users or our advertisers". Apparently they don't believe (a) that Catholics are likely to buy things or (b) that anyone wants to sell things to Catholics.

This morning I clicked through the link on Kathy's site to offer Google comments on the ads. I mentioned that it was disappointing that they displayed only PSAs and they would do well to consider that the audience for Kathy's site is much less likely to be offended by reading posts that are congruent with faith than by the primness that finds matters of faith to be too dangerous to mention.