Many progressive bloggers who use Google AdSense to monetize their blogs have to constantly deal with the hassle of preventing Republican and right-wing ads from serving on their sites. By using Competitive Ad Filters, bloggers can go far in mitigating these ads from serving.
Here is a simple description on how to filter your ads and a way we can share domains to keep on top of what would be an overwhelming project for one person.
To get going, in the “Ad Sense Setup” tab go to “Competitive Ad Filter.”
You will see two tabs in the lower part of the screen, “Ad Sense for Content” and “AdSense for Feeds,” in which you can enter advertiser domains to exclude. Be sure to enter all blocked domains in both if you serve ads to RSS feeds via FeedBurner. In most cases you will simply enter the domain without the www, i.e. “gop.com” and not “www.gop.com.” This is important in the event any of your blocked advertisers should serve ads linking to other sub-domains of which you may be unaware.
Building a list of blocked domains can take some time. It would be nice if there was a simple setting like “Block Republican Advertisers” or something but alas there isn’t. For the most part you would just have to just wait for a “bad” ad to serve, note the domain and add it to our list.
This method, however, has a critical shortcoming. Most campaigns will geo-target their ads, that is limit their ads to serve only within a specific geographic area. For example, John McCain’s senate campaign in Arizona would likely only book ads to serve to users in Arizona. If you are a blogger in Colorado, you would be unaware of the fact that McCain ads are serving to your visitors in Arizona. I have build a list of Republican and right-wing domains that I know remains very incomplete, however I’ll share it with you here and if you know of other domains, please add them to the comment thread. I’ll verify the domain and update the list. This way, I figure we progressive bloggers can help each other out.
As a final note, when testing ads do not click on AdSense ads on your own site. This is a violation of the AdSense program policies as it creates an invalid click and inflates advertiser costs and your earnings as a publisher. It can also get you banned from the AdSense program and make you susceptible to legal action. In most cases the domain will display under the ad or you can use the AdSense Preview Tool to get the destination domain without clicking the ad. The AdSense Preview Tool will also let you impersonate different locations to test for geo-targeted ad. It’s a must for any AdSense publisher.
Here is the link to my list again.