Google Ads and the Morals of Media

Exactly what are the responsibilities of ad driven businesses when it comes to pernicious advertisers? I've been thinking about this for a while in relation to the for-profit college industry, a business I've written about before that's largely a scam driven by access to federal loan programs.

I bumped into this question again the other day while helping put together the website for my partner Charlotta's new venture--a series of painting classes,and by the way, she's a fantastic artist and teacher. Charlotta and I considered advertising them on Google, but guess what? The prices of advertising on anything related to classes or education are sky high. For prominent placement on the searches we wanted in the New York area, in our limited experiments we paid $4.04 per click. Many of those clicks are more or less accidental. That's a lot of money to pay to have someone look at your site.

The leading advertiser we were competing with in the category is a for-profit Florida outfit call Full Sail University. A fascinating analysis by Wordstream rated "classes" as the 17th most expensive keyword category (right above "rehab": what that says, I just don't know") and "degree" as the 8th. What's driving this are the degree mills, and in this Google is not at all untypical. It's a huge ad category in media online and off. not to mention the New York subways,  where every other train seems to have been bought by Monroe College.

If investment banks are held responsible for facilitating the subprime loan business, will the media be held responsible for faciliating the subprime education business? I am not sure it should be. But I think much of media as we know it would no longer exist if we (I'm counting myself in the media) had to evaluate the ethics of each advertiser. I do find it striking though that the media, which is rarely short of sanctimony in looking at other industries, conspicuously fails to raise the question.

A note about this blog, by the way: It has stood fallow for a while now, and while I don't plan to restart a general commentary on business issues, I may post a bit more often.