What is Google's alcohol policy?

Google to allow alcohol ads in its ad network

Google recently announced that it will be accepting beer and alcohol related content for its Adwords network. That means advertisers can submit ads into Google's online advertising network that contain alcohol-related content and will subsequently show up on publisher's sites.

Why the sudden change of heart? Consider that Google makes the majority (90+%) of its revenues from online advertising. The majority of the revenue comes from small business owners. In other words, sites participating in Google's Adsense network.

Why is Google allowing alcohol content in its ad networks?

This brings on the question of why Google is allowing alcohol content all of a sudden, when it previously upheld a strict no-alcohol policy. The recession is putting great strain on the online advertising market, and while it's still kicking the print market's butt, and Google surprised Analysts once again with a better expected quarter in early 2009, we have a feeling things are going to get a lot worse throughout the year. And we're also conjecturing that Google, in order to maintain its margins, is having to relax some of its policies to allow more revenue in. In this case, the alcohol policy.

Does Adsense now allow sites with alcohol or beer content?

Google was specific in its news announcement by making the distinction that advertisers may not directly promote the sale of alcohol (with the exception of beer). Rather, they may only promote the information relating to alcohol that their website contains, such as brands and recipes. Beer, on the other hand, may be directly promoted and sold via an Adwords ad.

That beckons the question - if sites in the Adsense network, which display ads in the Adwords network, are still, according to the Adsense TOS, not allowed to place Adsense on pages that contain alcohol or beer related content (under the Site Content section they state that Sites displaying Google ads may not include:... Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol.

Does that make sense to anyone? It doesn't to us. According to Google's policies, sites may not put Adsense on alcohol or beer related pages, but any site in the Adsense network may now display beer or alcohol related ads? What makes it worse is that Google provides no way of filtering out alcohol ads.

This means if you are running a kid-friendly, non-adult site, while unlikely, it's possible that the automated content sensing mechanism that Adsense uses will decide one of the pages on your kid site is the best to place an alcohol related ad or one that directly promotes beer. What kind of message are they sending?

Tough economy or not, we feel its important that Google now do two things:

• Allow the placing of Adsense on sites containing alcohol, and/or beer related content, to coincide with their new Adwords policy.
• Allow Adsense publishers to filter out alcohol and beer related ads so that they will not appear on content pages that are kid-friendly, or not intended to be viewed by minors.

Do you agree? Make your opinions heard by commenting below.