Pixel Envy

Written by Nick Heer.

On the Future of MetaFilter

Matthew Haughey has written some more on the state of MetaFilter:

As Winter 2012 became Spring 2013, traffic remained flat and we all took big pay cuts to make ends meet. Google sunsetted their beta program MetaFilter was in and we went back to the standard Google Adsense ads which did pretty well and revenue improved a bit. Over the course of 2013, a series of messages from the Adsense team hit me with varying degrees of severity. We were temporarily banned from the system due to some text questions talking about sexual health (questions from users that include terms for body parts etc., but Google interprets that as the site being “adult”) and had to greatly beef up our ad display blocking by subject matter. Late last year, I was told that despite the past decade of Google’s Adsense pages suggesting ads should match your site, different background colors were now required to better discern ads from content, resulting in another large decrease.

I can’t imagine anything more frustrating than working on or for a website dependant on advertising from Google, who sell an astonishing share of internet advertising. Their policies are unclear and ever-changing, and their hammer comes down swiftly when a rule is broken.