Google Ads and GOLD - a Tense Relationship Today

November 04, 2008 | David

Google ads on the right side and footer of GOLD pages are temporarily disabled.

To support the hosting of GOLD, we use a portion of our site for advertising. At the top of the page (currently anyway) is a banner ad from Project Wonderful. In the right column and in the footer we have spaces for ads from Google. Ads can be intrusive, we know, but we’re trying to strike an appropriate balance between the intrusion and providing relevant ad content which, again, will hopefully offset at least some of the cost of hosting GOLD.

Google’s ads, to this point, have been pretty well targeted at our site’s content and users, until this morning. This morning, a political group with a lot of money to spend on a certain California proposition pretty well blanketed the Google ad space. This group’s political views run directly contradictory to those of the creators of GOLD, so we’ve turned the Google ads off until election day is over. We will not have our site space used to promote hatred and discrimination. If you haven’t figured out what I’m talking about, you probably don’t live in California.

Anyway, today you get a brief respite from ads, and we lose a day’s worth of hosting revenue offset. It’s worth it to us, but maybe you might consider clicking that “donate” button above to help.

If you haven’t already, get out and vote. Exercise your rights as an American—you never know when someone’s gonna try to take those rights away.