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The content is characterized as "highly technical longform static content in a minimalist layout optimized for fast loading & rendering catering to Anglophone S
by dooglius 9y ago
The content is characterized as "highly technical longform static content in a minimalist layout optimized for fast loading & rendering catering to Anglophone STEM-types in the USA", which is definitely true, but I think there's an important subset not mentioned. According to http://www.gwern.net/ http://www.gwern.net/ the most popular three articles on the site are about darknet drug markets, and #4 and #5 are reviews of specific controlled substances in the US. I don't know what the ads for these pages looked like, but here's an example from a Google search for "modafinil" in incognito mode with my adblocker turned off: https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png ["the silk road" and "lsd microdosing" didn't turn up any ads, but it's possible Google does more filtering on its own site than on others... I couldn't easily find any LSD review sites that used AdSense for a fair comparison]
If I saw an ad like that in a banner at the top of the page, it's going to cause an immediate, visceral reaction: the site is sketchy, maybe trying to scam me, and any content is going to have a big conflict of interest. To be fair, since I use an ad-blocker, I'm probably more ad-sensitive than the sample set... but who hasn't gotten their fair share of similar email spam before?
The CSVs don't have page information, unfortunately, but I'd expect most of the harmful effect comes from the drug-related pages.
- gwern 9y agoThe modafinil page didn't have AdSense during the experiment, and if it had, I think the content would have not involved modafinil; Google was burned badly years ago by mega-fines for allowing greymarket pharmacies to advertise and I assume it's totally filtered them out, so any served ads would be targeted at other personal characteristics, presumably. (I also vaguely recollect trying to buy some adwords once while experimenting with advertising gwern.net pages, and the drug categories being totally out of bounds.) During the experiment, roughly, the most popular pages were a mix: https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017---july-2017 https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017---july-2017 The top 5 were modafinil (excluded from AdSense), spaced repetition (psychology), LSD microdosing, DNB FAQ (also psychology), and "Story Of Your Life" (physics/literary criticism).