And all while I've blocked categories "Weight Loss" and "Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification" which I can only assume should be the categories they'd fit in.

Or may be they've placed their ads in "Get Rich Quick" category - you know, probably 'mistaking' it to be a personal incentive rather than a category. :)

Time to ask google for more categories to squelch. (goog luck on that!)

Time to ask google for more categories to squelch. (goog luck on that!)

Maybe they'll give us a "Spam" category we can block :)

saw them today on a scientific site about icebergs in Antarctica

May be these belly-flatters have some demographic data about net-savvy penguins which we don't understand, eh?

What's the prob if they are paying?

What's the prob if they are paying?

Money isn't everything.

once a lot of people have been burned by them they might be reluctant to ever click any ad ever again

CTR on most of my sites has been in a slow downfall in the past year. We can't afford to burn new clickers and shoppers.

1,5% of income
1,8% of impressions from weight loose ads

I really did not expect something like this.

As a consumer, I'm seeing those ads all over the place. I don't like seeing them, particularly at work. It makes the sites look spammy, and it makes it look like I'm visiting shady sites. I tend to close the browser window if I'm on a site with those ads and a staff comes into my office.

This is also something that will cause more people to block adsense. Not a good thing for Google or for publishers.

What amazes me is they appear in a prestigious online news outlet.

We may have a different opinion based on experience or whatever and I don't mean to sound like I'm defending these type ads - I know a lot of people don't like to see them on their sites or the sites of others.

But a "prestigious online news outlet" site, a site about Polar Bears or icebergs or whatever just might have the perfect audience demographics to generate a lot of clicks for those ads. And by "audience demographsics" I don't mean just that the audience members have bellies that could use a little less bulk.

It's easy to overestimate the actual street-smarts and common sense of people conventional wisdom & pop culture tell us are the smart people among us.

FarmBoy

The editor replied: "We can't control the ads you see and unfortunately we need the revenue to keep the publication going"

I shared this thread with teams here, but we can't take action against the possible policy violations mentioned here unless you give us details to investigate.

ASA

If you see an ad that you think may be violating AdWords policies, please please please report it

They're just a really, really crappy user experience. Which in some instances is a reason for Google to lay the hammer of Thor down, and in others, allow them to flourish while Google takes their cash.

If Google really doesn't know what ads people are talking about in this thread, then they can't be helped. I'm no adsense expert, but I'm seeing them everywhere. It's hard to even visit a linux forum without seeing this crap.

Simply because of one line on a page? e.g.:

"Out blue widgets date back to 1966 when people told us we had fat chance of marketing them."

The thing that gets me is I see very few ads to quit smoking and you'd think there would be a ton of those appearing right about now as well.

Newspaper bring this ads since decades.

"Block ads containing these words" (including pattern matching...)

Won't help for image-based ads. And then there's foreign language ads...

(Yeah, I know, standard disclaimers apply: It's not in Google's interest to do this, etc. etc. -- so I'm not holding my breath.)

Newspaper bring this ads since decades.

Yep.

And who knew those ...

"Be a Tiger Mistress
Learn How I Did It"

... ads of the last couple of years were so popular with clickers?

FarmBoy

The question is that are they putting them in any Google categories, or certain ones.
They must be spending a lot of doh !