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Thursday, June 15, 2006

The Irony of Google Ads

I signed up for Google Ads a couple of months ago so this blog could generate some money. these are the ads in the light colored box above the newest post. Click on them and you support this blog.

Today I noticed one of the ads is for potting soil that contains Miracle Gro. I hate Miracle Gro and even though each click to that site will likely generate a lot of revenue for this blog to me it will be dirty money (oh Gawd, a bad pun and not intended). I cannot endorse Miracle Gro or any other Scott's/Monsanto product.

MG is not organic in anyway shape or form. It does not build healthy soil, it does bad things to the soil's microherd when applied because it contains salts that burn delicate life and buying and using it supports what I consider a bad corporation for a variety of reasons such as GMO's, creating a lot of bad ag chemicals, having a monopoly on our seeds (they now own something like 75% of the world's commercial seed stock).

So I deal with irony of a MG ad on a blog about a person who practises deep organics and would never ever use the stuff (we even have a box of MG rose restorer that came with this farm, as did a gallon of RoundUp, another Monsanto product, which we will never use).

And now that I think of it this post will likely flood this blog with even more Monsanto product ads. Oy Vay!

2 comments:

Scott said...

I encourage you to act on your principles and get rid of the ads.

I faced the same dilemma on my blog, and got rid of them, for what it's worth.

I enjoy reading about your farming. Hopefully within the year I will be moving my family to a nice small farm in the Apalachian foothills of Ohio.

Daniel McLaury said...

You know, you can block specific Google Ads. It's mainly meant so that a company can block ads from their competitors, but you can block whatever you want:

(1) Right click on the offending ad, and hit properties to see what it's linking to. There's a bunch of data for adsense, but at the end there's something like adurl=http://whatever.com/; that's who's running the advertisement.

(2) Go to your Adsense console, click the "Adsense setup" tab, choose "Competitive Ad Filter," and follow the instructions.

Bingo! No more ads you don't agree with.