Targeting Children with Adsense
August 25th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Advertising, Ideas, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I’m not speaking about the information in this post as something I approve of dissaprove of, it’s just something interesting I came across that made me think.
Now we’ve all read the reports that people often have a hard time distinguishing advertising from content. In many cases they click on an ad without knowing it’s an ad. One of the classic examples of this is putting adsense directly below an image (see below for a sample)
As my kids are learning to read and type they are exploring a wider variety of sites on the internet. One of the things they like to do most is play flash games. If it has anything to do with princesses they totally get into it. Recently they wanted to visit a new site, after checking it out I saw it had some adsense on it, but other than that was definitely family safe so I let it through. Now I said to myself “hmm I bet that site owner probably gets some decent clicks from the kids since they probably don’t know they are clicking on ads” and mentally filed the information away.
The other day I got the call from the computer “dad the games aren’t working …” so I came to investigate. When I discovered what was happening it was actually pretty clever. Normally the adsense ads appeared on top of the images of the game. Underneath the image of the game was the game name and a small blurb. However sometimes when the page loaded the position of the adsense and the game blurb reversed.
Use this information at your own risk.
Sphere It
August 25th, 2006 at 6:24 am
Having a parenting/children’s site with tons of links to safe kids sites - all of which I check first and regularly - can’t say I’ve noticed this little earner - but it’s probably better than having tons of annoying, flashing banners. Might be worth regularly checking the sites your kids visit - the link to my ‘cute and pretty puppies to colour’ page changed to a very different type of ‘puppy’:0
August 25th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Gross!
What type of software do you recommend to block sites on my kids computer? I’d rather block all sites and only allow a handful that I know are safe rather than the other way around.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:34 am
I have a hobby site for kids called Ducksters.com. I have Google Ads on it to try to pay for it. Also, I try to filter out any ads that are not appropriate for kids.
However, I would really like to get more control over the ads and only have ads that are specifically for kids. Even better if these ads would have some real benifit (even if just entertainment) to kids that clicked on them.
Any ideas?