In sad news for Internet porn, Google began sending notices yesterday to owners of adult-themed Blogger sites, saying that beginning June 30, it will begin to “strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger.” That means that any blog displaying advertisements that Google deems inappropriate will will have to 86 the naughty ads or face being shut down. Huh. That’s going to annoy a lot of sex writers, I imagine.
These notices first came to light when columnist Violet Blue, who uses Blogger to host her popular site Tiny Nibbles (extremely NSFW) received an email from Google and publicized it on her Twitter:
Here’s the email Blogger accounts got late tonight from Google. Many blogs will be deleted; no definition of ‘adult’ pic.twitter.com/V1afmeq84r
— violet blue ® (@violetblue) June 27, 2013
For clarification, the current Terms of Service calls adult content, “images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity” and says that it permits adult-themed blogs as long as they are properly marked as such in the Blogger settings. It also states that it does not allow users to “create blogs where a significant percentage of the content is ads or links to commercial porn sites,” which would appear to gel with this upcoming purge.
However, some people are receiving this notice despite never having used their Google account to create any kind of blog in the first place, which doesn’t inspire a lot of faith in Google’s ability to differentiate between exploitative commercial ventures and thoughtful sex-positive websites for grown-ups. It’s also incredibly unclear what Google considers to be an “advertisement to adult websites” in these new guidelines: if you run a site that reviews adult toys, for example, but that never links to “commercial porn,” you might have been safe under the old TOS but not under the upcoming one. Or you might be fine.
This is devastating news for professional writers like Violet and others who began using Blogger as far back as 1999 to subvert the mainstream porn industry. WordPress doesn’t offer much sanctuary as it prohibits all adult content, but soon-to-be homeless bloggers may be able to move themselves over to Yahoo, which seems to be more lenient with adult content, at least if their recent decision to leave Tumblr’s porn community alone is any indication.
(via The Verge)
- Google’s put the kibosh on Google Glass app development, too
- Maybe Google’s just mad it got infected with that porn bug
- We can get behind its algorithm to get rid of child porn, at least
