Google Bans Older Women Younger Men Ads in Adsense

Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson with Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate”Google’s Influence on Internet Culture and American Social Policy

Google insists that it’s not determining cultural policy in America and the rest of the world. Note: images can be segregated in Google Image search, based on country. Saudi Arabia’s cultural policies needn’t dictate America’s.

But an article in today’s New York Times suggests they are. Call us stupified, and it gets worse.

Google Adsense Won’t Accept Cougar Ads

Google has determined that websites promoting older men/younger women dating is fine in its Adsense network. Ads like DateaMillionaire.com move at random through the Google Adsense network, shown as text and display ads in the Adsense network of publishers like Anne of Carversville.

You see Adsense ads everywhere on websites. Here they are on our Anne of Carversville Shopping website.

This commentary is focused on the Google Adsense network, not Google Safe Search Images.This moment, there are the same 100 plus images in Google Image search under strict, moderate and unfiltered for cougarlife.com.

This week Google determined that ads for cougarlife.com are no longer permitted in the Adsense network.

Google continues to allow similar advertising for the many sites that match older men and younger women, like DateAMillionaire.com, which assures its clients they can meet “sugar babies.”

As the NYT writes, ‘cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in’. Worse, if you date younger men, you are in the “adult world”, which is hardly respectable.  This is the same problem for being in unfiltered search for Google Images. You are in some pretty scummy company, even when you’re a jewel of a website like Anne of Carversville.

The business impact of Google’s decision on cougarlife.com is ads will no longer appear on more than 6,700 Web sites, including Ask.com, YouTube and MySpace, which accounted for 60 percent of its traffic, said Thomas Koshy, vice president for marketing at CougarLife, a Toronto-based site that says it has a half-million members, men and women.

Noting that this is a new policy on Google’s part, not an old one that requires fixing, we’re left to conclude that Google considers older women dating younger men as not a suitable topic for children and not family-friendly.

Google, which has more than a million advertisers, would not comment on why sugar-daddy sites are still considered family safe, but cougar sites are not. The company’s decision, made public this week by CougarLife.com, has rankled not only advertisers but women who have embraced the cougar concept as a symbol of empowerment, of older women bucking dating stereotypes. via NYTimes

Google must admit that this is a clear case of defining what is acceptable dating behavior among women. And this policy gets to the heart really of the Anne of Carversville’s problem with Google Images.

In its decision to promote older men/younger women and sugardaddies, Google IS determining America’s cultural policies. I repeat that as a woman of a certain age, this article leaves me speechless.

Secondly, Google’s new decision for cougarlife.com is catastrophic for their business model and revenue stream. In our case with Google Images, their decisions completely turned our about-to-launch revenue challenge upside down. Cougarlife.com’s revenue loss is easily quantified.

My next post will deal with the problem of developing a woman-friendly website in a child-friendly, Conservatives-values are escalating world. The NYTimes article is a sobering reminder that much hasn’t changed for women in America.