Do You Suppose It Was the Atheism?

atheism, atheist, atheophobia, google, adsense, bigotry,
This is the email that I just received from Google AdSense:

Hello,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Reading that, you'd think I regularly exhorted my readers to sedition against the federal government, like any good wingnut blogger, or proposed death and suffering for those who don't believe as I do, like any good fundy blogger. Do you suppose it was my risky use of the "f word" or just my general atheist tendencies?

I'm Not Selling Out

I'm buying in.

Yes, the ads are a little . . . off topic. But would it kill you to click on an ad for 1,600 prolife products? Is a Jesus belt buckle really that unfashionable? And what about your career? You could totally have your master's in 16 months- online! Who doesn't need that kind of personal and professional advancement?

Besides, I've earned $0.41 this week. Three more weeks, and I can have a coffee from Dunkin' Donuts.

Crass Commercialism

money, adsense, commercialism, christian, atheism,

Okay, so I’m no artist on my blog. I’m pedestrian, I use proper grammar and spelling and have occasional flashes of snarky goodness, but I’m torn on the whole adsense monetization thing.

Actually, no I’m not. I’d love to adsense the fuck out of my blog and make some extra cash. I really need money. Really need it. Like now.

My problem with the whole adsense deal is that, as the above screenshot shows, the ads that appear on my (mostly) atheist blog are all ads for books on evangelism, websites about evangelism and work at home scams. I can’t willfully display ads for Christian evangelism on my (mostly) atheist blog. Morally, I have no problems making money off of fundys that buy that kind of stuff. In fact, as an atheist, I find the idea amusing. However, I can’t morally get behind shoving that sort of thing in my atheist/agnostic/pagan/etc. readers’ faces.

You know what I wouldn’t have a problem with, and I wish adsense had a suggestion box- if half the ads were for Christian things and half were for atheist or nonreligious things. See, the reason the Christian ads come up is that my blog is filled with words like “christian” and “jesus” and “evangelism”. However, my blog is also full of words like “atheism” and “atheist”, so surely the people at google could work on something. Or, maybe you could choose to opt out of certain categories of ads. People who feel makeup and weight loss advertising encourages low self esteem in women and girls could just select not to display the categories of weight loss and makeup. People who feel that internet dating is dangerous could opt out of that. I wouldn't mind that system at all.

Anyway, that’s my whingeing for today.