Day Trip Media: Gambling Related AdWords Allowed - If You're A Big Enough Company...

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Gambling Related AdWords Allowed - If You're A Big Enough Company...

Following a week of massive traffic surges thanks to ITV's lack of planning with their Bingo Night Live site, I was taking a look at the way the SERPs had moved in the last few days. It says a lot about Google that ITV have moved up to the top on some variations of the term pushing me down a couple of places. But then something struck me as annoying / amusing / WTF? The people at ITV are running Google AdWords for their TV programme, as you can see in the screen shot below.

AdWords bingo advert

Ok, so this is interesting on a couple of levels. Firstly it sort of backs up what I said in the first post about ITV's poor planning ahead of the show. They are now having the to pay for traffic via the AdWords slot rather than getting the top billing they should rightly have. That's also the amusing element of the equation.

Now, the second and bigger point I wanted to make is the annoying / WTF one, and it has some far reaching implications as well as highlighting some outrageous hypocrisy on Google's part. If you've worked in the gaming field and used to AdWords, you'll know how much of a dead end it is. Google has a ban on any sort of gambling related advertising (foolishly as it's legal in the UK) and the only way around it for small time webmasters is to game the system.

You can still see bingo relates AdWords if you look, many using tricks to get around AdWord's automatic filters that stop the ads being input into the system. But from my estimation, Google has approved ITV's advert, even though it uses the term bingo in the actual ad copy. In the past when I've used AdWords to do my gaming PPC, using the word bingo in the copy would stop the ad showing and you would need to file an exception to get the ad showing. This was in the days when you could indirectly advertise bingo via newsletter sign-ups and similar ruses. The fact the the ITV ad has the word bingo in it leads me to believe they have filed an exception and had it manually approved.

If this is the case, it's pretty staggering. The ITV site makes a big point of trying to get people to sign up to their pay-to-play bingo site. Whilst Bingo Night Live is completely free to play, this commercial element is no different from the sort of thing us affiliates were trying to do back when we could use AdWords to get gaming traffic. So, for me, this begs the question - if your ad spend is big enough, does it give you a free pass to bend the rules and get away with stuff us smaller advertisers would have our accounts killed for?

There's a good chance I could be wrong about this, but if I am right and Google has manually approved this advert then it's just a real kick in the teeth for webmasters like me. It also highlights some really shoddy double standards on Google's part. I'd love to be legally getting my adverts into AdWords, but it would seem I'm going to have to be a much bigger spender before that happens.

Personally, I don't understand why Google doesn't open up AdWords to gaming websites. You can't turn on the TV without seeing an advert for online bingo or casinos on the TV, and it's fine for MSN and Yahoo to carry gaming adverts. But Google still insists on keeping it off their SERPs, loosing out on millions of pounds of revenue as well. Yes there will be issues of quality and loads of spam, but look at the sites on retail AdWords listings and you'll see 3 spammy sites for every legitimate advertiser. Let's hope things change in the near future, then I won't find myself getting annoyed when I see stuff like this allowed.

Posted by Dio Bach at 12:43

1 Comments:

Rogier said...: A year after your article it seems to get bigger this unfairness!

Poker is banned completely, but sites as 888.com and fulltilt are still in with adwords...outside the UK!!!

The problem with Google is tht you cant caal them or email them normally. And when you email, you get a respons linking to the help centre!

It seems that Google uses DETOURNEMENT DE POUVOIR (missuses its power) wich is forbidden in allmost all international laws

I really hope we (webmasters) can find better ways to SEO...if no one ever will advertise again on Google...then Google will fall down; 01 August 2009 00:57