Audism Experiment Wrap-Up

Hello everyone,

It's been a couple of weeks, and I received a few responses from you out there to help me with Audism Experiment #4. So let's get these results out of the way. The labels attached to this group were;

- American Sign Language
- CODA
- Culturally Deaf
- Deaf
- Deaf Clubs
- Deaf Community
- Deaf Culture

Here are the screen shots of what I just viewed on this particular post;

So from my end, I did not get a single ad related to anything Deaf, deaf, or to Audism. Huhhhhh? I don't know either. It kind of feels like a fluke or something. Now here are the results from you all;

- Audi A6 limousine lease
- Concept map software
- Audi rss A5 and SS Felgen
- Auto online
- Audi A3
- Car insurance
- 2012 Hearing Aid Guide
- Med El Cochlear Implants
- Middle ear implant
- Sign Language Games
- 5 signs of depression
- Songbird Hearing Aids
- Free disability screening
- Disability
- Hearing Aid Deals

Now this is more to what I expected based on what I had seen in the previous three experiments. Because of this, I am going to call my screen shots for this experiment a fluke.

On the overall, I'd have to say that I could see the pattern of Audism in Google AdSense advertising quite clearly. Certainly not every ad was audist, but there were more ads promoting Audism than there were showing Deaf Culture in a positive and/or neutral light. Lets get some numbers here to back this finding up.

54 of 130 ads were directly related to hearing aids, cochlear implants, hearing loss, and disabilities.That's 42% of the advertising.

11 of 130 ads were for something either positive or neutrally related to the Deaf Community and culture. That's just a mere 8% of the advertising.

The rest of the ads were not related to either Audism or Deaf. We could say that all the Audi ads were related by their spelling and AdSense's auto-pairing/matching things up by label (even if it's only the fist 4 letters that match up in the word 'Audism'). There were 8 ads of the 130, for a 6% share. I find that sad that there were almost as many ads for Audi as there were for Deaf Culture. But at least that's not a sign of Audism.

I think the findings speak for themselves, and has led me to the conclusion that AdSense is promoting Audism on my blog! This is not something that sits well with me. It was very tough to see these ads on the blog over the last month, so this is what I will do;

I plan to go into my AdSense settings and begin to block all of these ads. I have a feeling that this will be a long, drawn out, and perhaps even slightly continuous process because I have to block them by web address. It's inevitable that new sites will pop up, etc, etc. This will take some time. I have however, earned about enough money to buy myself a lunch at a sub-shop. It's not a lot, but it's enough for me to say I want to keep AdSense. Any amount of financial support I can get from the time I put into the blog is nice, but I do not wish to earn anything off of Audism related advertising, and that's the key for me. If I can get these audist ads off of the page, or even at a bare minimum, then I think this is how I plan to proceed.

Agree with me, or don't agree with me. Either way, I would love to know what all of you think of this plan. Is this a good or bad idea in your eyes?

Until next time,

R. M.